Essential Question Response: Friends

This post is a response to my Essential Question ‘What will make me happy?’

I recently saw this video on someone else’s blog, and I really liked it:



There are two reasons this video makes me happy to watch.

The first is, I’m pretty sure, the same reason it makes other people smile: it’s a moving and inspiring story that makes you feel like even the smallest gesture can escalate into a huge movement that really makes a difference. That’s what happened with Free Hugs—now people from Korea to Amsterdam are involved in it, and are, in a little way, making people happier.

The second reason is that it reminds me of my friends. Where I hang out at school (a place called the Alley… I don’t know who named it or why, so don’t ask, but it’s not a real alley), we have a form of free hugs called ‘glomping.’ A glomp is a ‘sudden and random hug-attack that comes out of nowhere and needs no explanation’ (definition courtesy of one of my friends). The first few months of school you could hardly take a step in the Alley without being glomped. It’s died down a bit by now, but there are still times when someone will suddenly go on a glomping spree. And if someone is feeling upset—and looks like it—it’s not unusual for them to get a hug. Sometimes glomps are just as a joke—one of my friends once glomped another guy and then sang ‘You’re Beautiful’ to him while kneeling—but other times it’s a gesture of comfort and friendship.

So I guess what I really want to say in response to my essential question is that my friends make me happy. They’re there to joke around with, but they can be serious if you need it. They never hesitate to comfort you if you look sad. Another thing I really love about everyone I hang out with is that we, to put it bluntly, have no shame. We’ll belt along to ‘Popular’ for irony’s sake (we’re pretty far from popular) even if the entire campus is staring. We’ll be fire hazards by doing a self-dubbed ‘foot-dance’ on the stairs even when there’s no music. We’ll jump around and call ourselves ninjas although most of us can’t even do a handstand.

So like the man in the ‘Free Hugs’ video, my friends aren’t afraid to do things that are usually dubbed as stupid or the farthest thing you can get from cool. Because of them, I laugh (sometimes up to the point of hyperventilation) every day. They make me very, very happy.