Date Night and a Social Experiment

This past Monday, Ryan and I decided to go on a date to the Nickel Arcade. As we were walking in Ryan told me, "I've secretly wanted to go to one of these places since I was 3."

Backstory: When Ryan was 3, his family went to Chuck-E Cheese. At some point during the excursion, Ryan pooped his pants. He was...and I guess still is... a bit of a free spirit. Instead of letting his parents know, he just took his pants off and buried them in the ball pit. He wasn't going to let that little incident stop his fun, so he proceeded to go down the slide and leave a nice brown streak behind him... allllll the way down the slide... His poor mother had to go into the ball pit and find his poop-filled shorts. And then he received a life-time ban from Chuck-E Cheese. After all of that, I can understand why his parents would never take him to any other similar places because, I'm sure fishing through the ball pit for some poopy pants was a traumatizing experience.  

So, he hasn't been back to an arcade/games/tickets for prizes kind of place in 20 years. I'm not sure it was as exciting this time as it was then, but it was still a lot of fun.

I was really excited to put my nickels in and watch as all the tickets came out. I was disappointed to find out that they stopped using tickets and nickels, and that now it's all just on a card that you scan to play the games. I was also disappointed to see that the prizes are not nearly as cool as I remember them being. We did get a pretty great sign though. I'll provide a picture so you can see how cool it is. I think we are planning to hang it on the bathroom door.

 

I promised Ryan that if he let me take a picture of him with the sign, that I would let him take a picture of me. However, I'm at school right now, and don't have the sign with me and I would like to just publish this blog post, so I photoshopped the sign into this picture of me.

The social experiment part of the title of my post, has nothing to do with date night, it's just something else I wanted to write about. 

School started last week. (It's probably going to be the death of me. I could take a whole blog post to complain about how much homework I've had in only one week of classes!) Anyways, in one of my classes we are learning about families in cultures around the world and about diversity and stuff. My teachers goal is to make us as uncomfortable as possible to help us get out of our comfort zones. (I'm a big fan of my comfort zone, so I'm not exactly thrilled to be spending another 3 months with this class... but "I can do hard things..." I'll try to survive.) Anyways, we have to write about 6 papers throughout the semester and they will all make us do something that isn't comfortable. To help us broaden our horizon and stretch ourselves. She also wants us to feel lots of emotions. 

Our first paper was due this week. It was the "Breaking a Social Norm" Paper. What we had to do was break a social norm. (haha, I bet you couldn't have guessed that!) In my paper I wrote about being a staunch follower of social norms. Because I am. I hate feeling uncomfortable, and I hate making other people feel uncomfortable. I go out of my way to avoid doing anything that could annoy anyone (except Ryan of course ;) and any other close friends or family), or to avoid running/bumping into any strangers. I avoid crowds, I stay quiet, I don't make comments in my classes. I stick to ALL the social norms. 

Anyways, so this assignment was difficult for me. But it turned out to be enlightening, and even kind of fun towards the end. The social norm that I decided to break was personal space. (Specifically public personal space, because I get in Ryan's personal space all the time, but that doesn't count.) I started off with small baby steps. Like sitting right next to someone in my class when there were plenty of other seats to choose from not close to anyone. (It always makes me really upset when people do that to me. It's ridiculous, I know, but I just sit there and fume over the fact that they HAD to pick the one chair right next to me. If they hadn't, I might have been able to sit by no one for an entire class period!" Not very return missionary-like of me... I'm working on it...) But, because I'm at BYU, the person I chose to sit next to didn't seem to be upset at all! In fact she decided to make small talk! And I don't like small talk, so I think I was actually more uncomfortable than she was! I tried again in some of my other classes and nothing happened, and then I tried at the library, and that didn't result in anything good to write about either.

Luckily, I have Ryan, and he is good at encouraging me to go out of my comfort zone and to be brave. He helped me to get some better reactions.

Example #1: Old lady at Red Robin
We went out to dinner at Red Robin (Ryan's favorite place, and my favorite place for fries... if you ever want to get us a gift but don't know what to get, a Red Robin gift card is the way to go. ;) Just kidding, don't send us any gift cards.) I sat REALLY really really close to this lady that was waiting for her table while we were doing the same thing. She scooted over, which is understandable, so that there was more room for me. But then I scooted even closer to her, which is when I could sense her discomfort. A fellow lover of personal space. She scooted over some more. Then when I was "adjusting myself" (aka getting even closer), my purse touched her arm and she folded her arms to take up as little space as possible. What really made me laugh was when she stood up and grabbed a menu as an excuse to get up and then sit back down like a foot away from me, as close to her husband as humanly possible.

Example #2: Walmart's Shampoo Aisle
For my next part of the experiment, we went to the shampoo aisle. (We didn't actually need shampoo.) I stood extra close to one girl that was looking at Suave shampoo. I decided that I needed to look at the ingredients on one of the bottles on the other side of her, so I just reached in front of her. Then I kept getting closer to her. She turned her back to me, and talked to her friend. Then she stepped over, and then they just left. We tried again on the other side of the shampoo aisle. One guy was looking at something so I reached for a shampoo bottle close to him. He stepped away, and then stepped again, and then walked ALL the way to the other side of the aisle to get away from me. (Normally when I'm at the grocery store and I need something, but someone is standing in front of it, I'll pretend to do something else until they're done, and then I'll grab what I need. I think that is what he did.)

Example #3: Walmart Checkout Line
The last thing I did, was get in the personal space of a lady in the checkout line. We were waiting in line, Ryan was behind our grocery cart, and I was in front of it. (One of my biggest pet peeves is when people do this to me at the grocery store. You may not know this, but there actually IS a right and a wrong way to stand in line at the grocery store in my mind.) Poor lady, was just putting her groceries on the belt thing, and I was standing as close to her as possible and reaching over her groceries to grab different packs of gum. I could definitely sense her discomfort. She moved a lot. While she was paying for her groceries, Ryan kept pushing the cart into me so I'd have to get super close to her, and she felt like she needed to move, even though it was totally her turn to pay for her groceries. I felt the most obnoxious during this trial of the experiment. But, I got enough of a reaction to write about it.

So, there you go. Moral of the story:
- I'm not as sweet as I seem in person, I have all sorts of ridiculous frustrations inside my head that you now know all about...
- If you get close to people they will move out of your way.
- I feel more comfortable when I stick to the social norms.