THE INTERN ENDURANCE CHALLENGE: DYLAN HOULE

Ok, wow.  I’ve spent the better part of the past five months watching episode after hilarious episode of… The Golden Girls.  Those girls – Blanche, Rose, Dorothy, and that fuckin’ hot grandma Sophia – have been with me through a lot: lulling me to sleep after abrasive nights of drinks and drugs, providing great background noise to not so great one-night-stand sex, and just getting me through boring Tuesday afternoons. 
    Maybe you’re wondering why, exactly, did I watch Every. Single. Episode. Ever.  Something called the Chief Magazine Endurance Challenge (for unwitting, eager-to-please interns) made me do it.  The challenge was to watch them all, take a picture after each episode, and generally record the decline of a young man subjected to 180 episodes full of jokes like this: “Oh boy, we're going to a sperm bank. I wonder if they have a drive-up window!”  Yeah…
    Ed Zipco, the evil fuckin’ mastermind of this project came up to me and said, “Dylan, yeah, we’re gonna go ahead and do an endurance challenge.  You can either watch every episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Wings, or something behind the mystery door.” [Editor's Note: There was a fourth option, which was being fired on the spot. Just wanted to put this in perspective.] Now, like every self-respecting kid who came of age in the ‘90s, I had already seen every episode of Fresh Prince and, also like every self-respecting kid who came of age in the ‘90s, I had never heard of Wings.  So, mystery door it was.  And everyone in the office that day just pointed at me and laughed and laughed and laughed.
    But pretty soon every other intern developed an acute jealousy of the fact that while they were busy doing transcriptions or spamming all their friends on myspace, I was quietly giggling along with those old hags. [Editor's Note: You were also the only one allowed to get fall down drunk during office hours...]
    And somewhere between Cocoa (the gay cook who got axed after the pilot in favor of Sophia) and Dorothy getting married to a dude she met in episode 179 (which means they dated for a total of 44 on-screen minutes; I guess when you’re old you’ve got no time to lose.  But to be fair, he was Leslie Neilson.) I pretty much fell in love with all those wacky, sex-crazed, shit-talking girls.  How could I not?  They laid down the blueprint for the seminal women/sex/money show of my generation: Sex and the City.
    None of the girls are dead yet, but Sophia, rumor has it, is insane.  Like, really.  And you know what?  So is the intern who agrees to do the next Endurance Challenge.  
























Pic 1: Ah, just beginning.  You can tell how long ago I started this project based on my clothing.  It’s still cold outside.  I’m looking pretty smug ‘cause I’m the only one in the office not doing MySpace spamming.




























































































































































Pic 8: Shedding clothes, wearing glasses, drinking the first beer of the day.  This is shaping up to be the best assignment ever.






































































































































Pic 16: By now I’ve heard the same set of jokes 16 times.  Yet, I’m still laughing at all of them. 




















































































































































































Pic 24: Okay, so sometimes this show gets a little creepy… as evidenced by the fact that Blanche calls her dad Big Daddy.  Was it okay in the 80s to do this?  Or only in the south?  Either way, I’m getting bored.



















































































































































































Pic 32: I’ve been counting on my fingers how many times the girls have collectively had sex every episode.  I ran out of fingers and became insanely jealous of them at the same time.  I haven’t had sex that much since freshman year of college.






























































































Pic 40:  This is just about the time when we fired an intern that talked about Russia all the time.  We made some YouTube videos chronicling my GG adventures and she left some really creepy comments on them.  It was about then that I knew this endurance challenge would turn me into a subculture freak phenom.

















































































































































































Pic 48: I was dating a girl during these first 3 or 4 seasons and while having sex with her all I could think about was that naked painting of Dorothy I scrounged up on the internet.  I told my girlfriend at the time that it was her fault, she just couldn’t keep me up, but she blamed it on the excessive amounts of Adderall I was addicted to.  We agreed to disagree. I didn’t bring up the nude Dorothy. I feel I made the right move.




























































































































































Pic 56: Are you ever watching a TV show and think to yourself, “Man, I’d really like to be playing Street Fighter II: Turbo Edition?”  I do all the time and sometimes I hop on the subway down to Little Italy and put a few quarters into the local arcade.  That’s what happened during this episode.






































































































































Pic 62: I’m not even halfway through the series and I’ve already made too many sex jokes.  Trying to write a creative by-line for every one is tiring.  I’m looking jealously at the other interns who are all now merely pretending to be myspace scamming, and are actually cruising Facebook writing all their friends that some poor sucker they know is watching every episode of the Golden Girls. 



















































































































































































































































Pic 69:  Ah, episodes 69 through 75…. Yea, I was on mushrooms.  Don’t remember a goddamn thing, but my friend said they were pretty racist.  But he was on mushrooms too.  I think I spent the majority of episode 72 in the bathroom trying really hard to figure out the meaning of The Legend of Zelda.












































Pic 77: The first overtly racist episode.  This show makes my jaw drop… it’s so incredibly pro-white in that “we’re not pro-white because we make sure to help minorities” kind of way. 







































































































































































































Pic 86: I’m becoming delirious.  My notes on the episodes are having less to do with the episodes and more to do with alternate lifestyle I’m living.  Except wait, I’m not fucking any kids…

















































































































































































Pic 94: No, really, Chief Magazine, for making me do this I recommend you hang yourself quick.  You have no idea how crazy I might be after this.  I might call all your moms and tell them the drugs you’ve been doing.  They’d probably say, “This better be good.  I’m missing Golden Girls for this.”

















































































































































































Pic 102: Four seasons down.  Three to go.  I can’t say I’m enjoying this anymore.  I’m not even going into the Chief offices anymore.  I just stay in my bed on my days off and listen to the incessant ramblings of “This one time, in St. Olaf…”




























































































































































Pic 109:  That’s a ballsack.





























































































































































































































Pic 119: The little caption I’m holding might say, “I don’t get it,” but clearly, judging by my awesome shirt and sunglasses, I do get it.  This may have been the episode I smoked weed from the minute I woke up 'til the minute I fell asleep for the 8th day in row to.  I had to rewatch the next 6 episodes because I laughed so hard I didn’t hear any of the jokes.



























































































































































Pic 126: I’m not doing well.  I haven’t exercised in days.  I haven’t slept in 32 episodes.  I haven’t pooped in three hours.  Well, I guess that last one’s pretty normal.





























































































































































































































Pic 134: Okay, this was one of the weirdest episodes for me because I actually stopped having sex with this girl I met off Craigslist in order to masturbate to Rose – she was wearing a goddamn sexy dress.  I didn’t feel bad; that girl left at 2:30am… I don’t even think I said bye or thank you or anything.  That’s called afterglow, kids.









































































































































































































































































Pic 148: My mindset is so fucked right now, I hate all grandmas.  Even my own.  Here’s some trivia for you: Sophia, the grandma of the show, is, in real life, younger than Dorothy, the daughter of the show.  That was a confusing sentence.  But age is a confusing thing.

















































































































































































Pic 156: It’s a rare thing when I stumble upon an episode I’ve paid enough sober attention to to deem it no good.  This was one of them.  Yet strangely, I can’t remember why I hated it.  I’m sure the combination of Blanche talking about her busty bosom was one the reasons because… she doesn’t have a busty bosom, dammit.





































































































































Pic 162: You know what, I thought about quitting this project about 30 episodes ago, but then I was told the alternative was getting scurvy.  Chief is a dirty place to volunteer your time.  Dirty.
















































































































































































Pic 171: I’m watching and writing about some of the last episodes now.  I will forget them all in a matter of days.  6 months of hard work gone in a single snort of heroin. 

















































































































































































Pic 180: Yes!  It’s over!  I love the Golden Girls; I hate the Golden Girls; I can’t wait to subject some new intern with big eyes and hopes to some similar form of extended torture.  Yea, put this on your resume, sucka.  Fuck you, Chief Magazine. 

[Editor's Note: Fuck you too, Dylan. Fuck you too. It was trial by fire, but now you're family. We couldn't be more proud. Cooking us up that homemade crack was just icing on the cake.]