be spontaneous

I am really bad at being spontaneous, and I hate that. I love people who can just do whatever at the drop of a dime, who are up for anything or going anywhere or taking part of any activity without second guessing it - life seems more fun that way. After discussing this with my friend Eric, we came up with a plan to have a greater degree of adventure in our lives: we created Days of Spontaneity. Each month, we are going to dedicate one day to not having a plan, whatever that looks like. Our first Day of Spontaneity happened a few days ago and it was a blast. It consisted of a bunch of random adventures around cville, starting with Eric surprising me (spontaneously!) by crawling through my window, which was a pretty fun/scary way to start the journey.

The rest of the afternoon was filled with things like visiting a pet store, playing Love Story on the piano in a furniture store where we tried to auction on something but got scared, going to K-mart instead of Wal-mart (CRAZY, I know), singing "Don't Stop Believing" at the bottom floor of Alderman Stacks, etc. We tried to document the day, but it was hard because we only had a dying camera and my phone, which I still haven't fully figured out. Even though it was just a chill day, everything we did was on impulse and there was such freedom in that. It was a good lesson in being.....well, spontaneous.

My favorite thing that happened was when we were in Dover Saddlery (applying for a job as a joke. This was another random idea we had and just went for it. The manager asked us if we were horse people. We replied "kinda" and then she told us that Eddie Bauer was hiring). Anyway, a homeless man named Tom came in and told us he was Deaf. I asked him if he could sign and we had a conversation in ASL - it was incredible. I have never had a spontaneous sign conversation before, and it was so cool to have that finally happen.

Some other random things we did are pictured below. If anything, it made me think about the joy of letting go and being open to the unexpected. Here's to hoping you are out having your own adventure:

a dramatic reenactment of Eric's window break in.

Eric decided to spontaneously parallel park!

Buying flannel pants for no reason

We made an employee's day by asking her to take our pic in K-mart

The place we found a snazzy piano to play on.

We found an Iron Claw somewhere.

Spontaneously parking on Thomson! It should have a "p".

We serenaded first years with Glee songs.

we made it down the creepy green stairs all the way to the pits of Alderman, where we gave the one girl studying there quite a show with our singing.

One of the coolest things we did was get a balloon at the party store, fill it with helium and release it from the steps of the Rotunda. We attached a note to it encouraging the person who (maybe?) will find it to be super spontaneous like us :)