Bold and Innovative New Ways to Meet People, pt. 1
Recently, I moved to Richmond as part of my attendance of Virginia Commonwealth University. I’ve lived in my dorm room in the city for about three weeks now, and have found myself disappointingly stagnant when it came to meeting people and becoming friends with them. My class schedule made traditional methods such as joining clubs incredibly difficult. In the face of loneliness, I decided to push the boundaries of social interaction; blaze a brand new trail.
I got my idea from a group of Christian activists who stood in a group, holding up signs that said why they were sinners. The sharpie-covered cardboard bits displayed messages such as “I am not a virgin but I told my parents I was.” and “I am a racist.” Apparently their goal was to bring an end to the belief that you needed to be perfect in order to become a Christian. Though I remained firm in my non-belief, I was impressed by the intense courage it took to do something like that.
My plan was to, as an atheist, do the opposite of what the Christians did. I would go out with a sign but instead of advertising my flaws and promoting a cause that would make me feel small, advertise how wonderful I was and in the process, make myself feel wonderful. Because the Christian activists were giving out fliers, I had to give those out too.
Over the course of the next three days, I fashioned a cardboard sign and wrote my flier. The sign wrote, “I am bored and want to talk to people.” The fliers were much denser with information with an entire page of 12-point Helvetica text split into two columns and shrunk to half its size sot hat it could be fit two-to-a-page.
Click here to see what the flier looked like as I edited it in OpenOffice.org
The next Tuesday, I’d go out to the area between the Dining Hall and the School library to see who I’d meet. You’ll find out how people reacted to this in a future update because I am milking this thing I did for content as opposed to just putting all of this information out there at once.
