Exhaustion

Due the fact that I only have classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, I so far have a habit of sleeping in on Tuesdays, and end up staying awake very late indeed. This morning I was overtaken, sinking deep in to the stupor afforded me by an audio book and a knitting project, working together in perfect unison to drown any normal human impulses, including sleep. So as I sat there and listened and knitted and listened some more, the next thing I knew I was looking at my clock, which proudly read 5:19AM. Great. They had won again, the twin devils mind and hands. As has happened so many times before, I simply sighed, and resolved to finish Speaker for the Dead before it was time for me to roll out of the position I had taken up on my bed and prepare for the day ahead.

Today was an especially long one. I was the day of the involvement fair. Now, the involvement fair is an event that the Campus Activities Board (or is it the SGA?) puts on every semester. It's supposed to be a chance for new students to peruse the rows and rows of tables bearing information and friendly faces from all he various organizations on campus. What it usually turns into in a forum for people to gather around the tables of the organizations they already belonged to and gossip. This especially holds true for the spring involvement fair. I am the president of a student organization, and we had a table there with everyone else. This kind of thing, on my campus, usually turns into an excuse to do something outrageous, out of the ordinary, or just plain strange to quell my boredom. The theme of this semester's fair was pirates, so I found the appropriate activity for such an occasion.
I perused the aisles, walking up and down them, hiding my face behind the posterboard that my friend had scrawled on sloppily. Of course, she never expected that I would actually DO it. No one ever really does until I do. Everyone I passed seemed either highly amused or slightly disturbed. A few packs of sororities jumped every time I came around a corner. I silently polled the people at the tables, occasionally stopping to asking other random people by pointing to the question. It was really warm in the building, so obviously some sweat began to build up along the edge of the poster; you can see it in the picture. Eventually I turned the posterboard around and wrote on the other side: Looking for Pirates to Battle. Who will Challenge Me? and walked around a few times more. No one bothered to challenge me. All the people that moments ago had claimed to be pirates simply refused to regard that it was their duty to accept my challenge. No matter, in my own way my amusement won it all for me. One person throughout all of this kept stopping me to ask me questions. Right before it was over, he told me he was trying to help me. He didn't understand why I was doing what I was doing. It was, after all, only going to make me look very strange to other people. Why was I doing this if not for the simple desire to make people think I was strange? I didn't bother to explain it to him, I simply turned and walked away. I wasn't doing this for anyone, I wasn't doing it for any of the people he referred to when he gave me that look of complete non-understanding. I was doing it for myself, and for the amusement of the people who could understand that there was not point to it, that there shouldn't be a point to it at all. They simply chuckled and shared in my own amusements over the strange situation. Sure it was strange, but in a positive way. And if he did not understand that, he did not deserve to have it explained to him.