If you haven’t read my about my coffee date challenge, you can read about it here (link here). To summarize it, my goal is to get coffee dates with 75 people who I have either never met before or haven’t gotten to know as well as I would like. I am currently at 46. The deadline is May 10th.
Also, I want to share one of the coolest emails I’ve gotten concerning my social challenge:
Your most recent “Voices” piece was shown in the display box on the Puget Sound website today. I ended up reading through it, and subsequently thinking it was fantastic. That most basic initiation of contact seems so forward and awkward in people our age (to me, at least), and it was really refreshing to even read about someone taking on a challenge like that. It correlated with a conversation I’d been having with a friend, recently, and it was great to be able to pass it on to him as well.
Thanks for writing about it, and hopefully, others of us will get up the nerve to pursue similar branching out.
D’awww. I’m flattered.
Today I want to talk about the pass-by behavior (for a lack of better term). This is the behavior you exhibit when you and some other oncoming person in the same walking lane pass by each other. Many of us keep to ourselves and look straight ahead when we pass by someone we don’t know. Some of us will even try to find excuses to make eye contact with the passerby, such as:
1) Pretending you just received a text message, or just straight up staring at your phone/reading old text messages
2) Suddenly appreciating how green our grass is and making sure our lawns are perfectly trimmed
3) Pretending you smelled something weird and trying to find out where it is by looking the other direction
4) Acting like you’ve never noticed “that one part” of a building before
5) Or acting like you’re smiling at a friend right behind them (this is often employed during rush hour walkway traffic)
Above: Socially Awkward Penguin
This behavior is not unique to our campus; it happens everywhere. I decided to do an experiment today by staring and smiling at every single person I pass by, directing my face at theirs to make it very obvious that I was looking at them.
Only eight out of thirty-seven people looked back at me, and of those eight, only three smiled back (data excludes people I know). All three who smiled back at me were women (yay). Yes, these data requires more trials and a more rigorous methodology to be anything remotely significant, but I hope you see the point I’m trying to make: Most people aren’t carpe-ing their diem.
I have 3 weeks left of college! I’m trying to carpe as much diem as I can…
…which is why I am embarking on a new sub-project: To get a coffee date by using Carly Rae Jepsen’s approach, the “Call Me Maybe.” To really understand what I’m doing, you need to watch this video (link). This song is one of the most listened to songs of all time; its music video has reached over 28 million views in less than two months. Even the men in my fraternity can’t stop singing this song. It’s so catchy.
My attempt to get a coffee date will follow the chorus: I will approach my targets (both men and women) and say “Hey I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me maybe.” I will then proceed to hand them a slip of paper that contains my phone number, followed by “call me maybe, we’ll get some coffee.”
And that’s it!
Everyone knows this song. Hopefully they’ll get the joke and hopefully they’ll play along and call me.
I’ll let you know how it goes… maybe.
P.S. I just finished my Senior Thesis for the Honors Program! It’s sixty-two pages discussing the “The Roles of Dendritic Spine Morphology and AMPA Receptor Trafficking in Long Term Potentiation.” This is what my Spring Break looked like for 16 hours a day (photo below):
P.P.S. This is my current wallpaper and what keeps me motivated to finish my challenge.
