Since my past two blog posts have been on the more serious side, I decided I should lighten things up a bit, so this post will be about Ryan Jones 
Everyone’s got someone that they can truly be themselves around. For some people it is their dog, for others, their mom. For me, I have Ryan Delis Jones.
Ever since first-grade, Ryan and I have known each other because we were on the same soccer team. Apart we’re both okay guys, me more than him, but together we’re simply idiots! The perfect kind of weirdos. Anyone can act stupid, but when you have another person supporting your stupidity no matter what you do, then it becomes a movement!
Discard every last bit of conventional wisdom and preconceived ideas you may have about us….we are absolutely off the deep end! Now, whether that’s good or bad, we simply don’t care because we don’t turn around to check who’s watching. We don’t let peoples judgment even phase us. If anything, we laugh right back at them until the situation is so awkward and they feel so uncomfortable that they begin to question our mental stability.
When I say “weirdo,” I know that everyone interprets that word differently. It might sound a bit off-putting, but let me remind you that many people would have considered Steve Jobs a weirdo when he was in high school. Now, I am not saying that either of us are likely to be the next Steve Jobs, but let’s just say we cover all ends of the weirdo spectrum. We have done everything from starting a company (not really in the slightest) to jumping off cliffs. Ryan always preaches “Friends don’t let friends do stupid things alone!” and believe me, I take advantage of that 100%. His motto is our excuse for doing something that our parents wouldn’t approve of.
While Ryan is usually the test dummy for our biggest moments of crazy, I happily take the credit afterward. On the flipside, he has a passion for stealing my ideas, or as he likes to call them “his ideas.” Case in point, my family decides to go on a trip around the world and somehow Ryan ends up spending a semester in Chiang Mai, Thailand the exact same year. This is actually perfect, because we all know that no Sharples trip would be complete without Ryan for part of it. My parents fondly refer to Ryan as “their sixth child” and he often accompanies us on family vacations. In addition, we also have an odd affinity to people with the last name Jones, and have met the majority of them on this trip already… (Steff, where are you? Just because you changed your last name to “Craig” doesn’t mean your getting out of this!)
Once it was confirmed that Ryan was going to be in Chiang Mai at PREM for half of this year, my parents changed our entire itinerary around the world to meet him. This resulted in us cutting Myanmar short by a week…thanks a lot Ryan!
Some highlights from Chiang Mai and with Ryan include:
1) Sneaking out of PREM and going on a run through the rice patty fields and mountains
2) Sharing a hotel room and watching The Silver Linings Playbook more times than I would like to say in this blog post
3) Watching a guy almost get beaten to death during a graphic Muay Thai fight.
4) Getting upstaged by a seventy year-old lady who had way more muscle than we did for crushing herbs into curry sauce
5) Losing a water fight to five elephants
It was a bummer to say good-bye in Chiang Mai, but we will see each other once again in the land of Bali.
(PS: I can’t really take credit for this whole blog post, it was a collaboration between the two of us. Ryan contributed the majority of the poorly written sentences and bad jokes, I added the rest.)
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