Anecdote: Geeking in Public- The Wrestling Tour of Campus
I can't remember precisely how it got started anymore. Suffice to say we were bored. It was about two-thirds of the way through our school's "winter term," a.k.a. January, on a desolate and lonely campus. There were the three of us, with two recently arrived from off-campus projects and me having been at the college since just after New Year's. People, yes--but short on ideas.
As I recall, we were just sitting around my room one night, talking about stuff, when for no good reason I jumped at the girl and began wrestling her, WWF-style. I don't know why I did this--I just have these urges every once in a while and I figure it's best to indulge them. At any rate, she fought back and we ended up yelling and bouncing around on the floor. The girl grabbed the boy, the boy grabbed me, and we all had an invigorating, platonic wrestle.
This brought up memories of boring weekends last year, when we lived on the other side of campus. We'd go into the main lounge, make a big pile of all the cushions we could find, and jump into them. It was great. So we decided that since we were feeling physical, we should head back to our old dorm and pile up some cushions. We got dressed in our best wrestling attire (warmups, ratty sweatshirts, etc.) and headed out.
The first building on the way from my current dorm to my old one happens to be the women's dorm. As we passed it, we thought: hmm. It might be fun to wrestle in there. So we went into the main lounge, noticed some people watching TV, and after some initial trepidation soon were flinging each other over the couches.
The next building on the way happened to be the "hippie" dorm. Well, if we wrestled in the women's dorm, we had to wrestle in the hippie dorm. Equal opportunity, after all. It was then that we realized that we were pretty much going to wrestle in every building on campus.
"Wrestling" is perhaps too broad a term. "Running around yelling and sort of pretending to bash each other and then sometimes rolling around on the floor" might be better. We hit each other with chairs, ran our partners into garbage cans, used blackboards as blunt objects, chased each other through the quad, and interrupted couples. We soon discovered that the most effective place to have at it was in TV lounges, where breaking the socially assumed silence made a nice diversion and helped to foster hostility and confusion. Noise was a key factor. The scariest place we wrestled was in the all-male dorm, where a bunch of jocks were watching TV. Luckily, we survived to tell the tale.
By the time we returned home, sweaty and out of breath, we had been laughing almost continuously for an hour. This, friends, is geeking in public: weirdness, disruption, and a complete lack of self-consciousness. To geek where others can see you is truly liberating. Try it sometime; you might be surprised at what you can do.