I was actually rooting for this one.Yes, my cold, dead heart grew three sizes on Friday. I wanted to see the world’s largest pillow fight on McKeldin Mall. Naturally, just under 2,000 people showed up, and statistically speaking, the fight was a miserable failure. Jesus, you guys – more than 2,000 people voted in the SGA elections.
(Side note: I’m kind of sentimental because that was my second-to-last SGA joke of the year. Come find me and I’ll autograph this column for you.)
But I digress. Rich Abdill wrote the story for Monday’s paper (“Pillow fight”), and guess who has two thumbs and did interviews with him? This guy!
All of the people we talked to were so psyched about the ability to run around and smack each other with pillows. It was a particularly long week for a lot of people, and the chance to wind down with some good, clean fun seemed like a hell of a great time, even if it was a little goofy.
I was a skeptic at first. My column was originally going to be about how stupid the whole thing was going to be. But I got there and met so many people who were just ready to chill out and have a good time that I was thinking, “How am I possibly going to make fun of this?”
We should try to set a goofy world record every Friday. Who cares if we don’t succeed? I’d love to see people come out and have some fun on a beautiful day just to do it. I mean, with all the gloomy, real, sad, scary things that have happened lately – and if you think I’m the columnist to write about all that, I’m not – let’s spend a day socking each other in the face with our pillows.
Somebody commented online that the pillow fight was a waste of $600. I’m sorry, $600? That’s two orders of mozzarella sticks at the dining hall. The SGA has wasted more money than that since you started reading this column (there we go). It really seems like a small price to pay for a couple thousand kids to enjoy themselves on a Friday night.
So that’s where I found myself on Friday, rooting for a pillow fight I thought I was going to hate. We need more off-the-wall, just-because-we-want-to-do-it ideas here. And it’s not just that it was fun, but also it was inclusive. The Senior Council promoted the hell out of it. That guy in the pillow suit probably got the crap kicked out of him running around the campus all that time to get the word out. We need more opportunities to just share some love because we’re people, not because we are in this club, that fraternity or that cult. Oops, I already said fraternity.
I absolutely support anyone with a fun idea – do it. Just because an idea is kind of weird doesn’t mean it’s not good. I believe that once upon a time, some “crazy” people had a dream. Those people? The founding fathers. You know, George Washington and Chuck Norris.
That dream? That dream was America.
Rob Gindes is a junior journalism major. He can be reached at gindesdbk@gmail.com.
