At dinner, my desire for mildly ridiculous circumstances got restless. I got very close to asking the man chopping meat behind the counter if the flank steak was actually "Hand Carved" as the sign said. But in the end I decided that asking pointedly ridiculous questions to men holding butcher knives is not the wisest life strategy.
As I was eating dinner, I noticed two girls outside, jumping from line to line on the sidewalk. It wasn't too remarkable of an activity, but it looked pretty fun. Naturally, I dashed outside to join them, and soon there were multiple sets of goals and parameters for line jumping. Josh, who I had been having dinner with, also joined me.
Initially, it had just been two friends having fun being goofy. People noticed, but didn't react much. After it became four people, all engaged in the activity, the social attraction to it grew proportionately. Almost every single person who walked by decided to try it, and those who didn't commented and made jokes about it. The social boundary of making a ridiculous activity acceptable had been broken.
Now, this only lasted about 5 minutes and didn't have much of a lasting impact on anybody. But I couldn't help finding a message to take away. All my undertakings so far have involved one guy doing something socially abnormal, hoping that people would notice. But one guy is not much of a social force, unless he soon gains company. The more people involved in activities, the more successful they will be in getting people to participate or play along. Maybe it's time to start expanding projects to include multiple people...
Look for updates on the Disaster Shirt tomorrow, and on public singing (possibly in Russian) on Wednesday!
I really like this post. It's interesting that people were so willing to join in.
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