Hold That Door!

Dance Marathon is TONIGHT!! Can you believe it? The Morale Team and I have been preparing for months and it's finally here! Excitement!

As excited as I am, I'm not going to talk about Dance Marathon just yet. I want to go, experience the fun, and come back to tell you all how it went down in great detail. You know you're stoked. But what I want to talk about today was inspired by Dance Marathon.

My team within the Morale Team is running a 3 hour segment of the show (3-6am YES!). This means that for those three hours, we are in charge of entertainment, music selection, games, etc. One of the games we chose to play is a Clemson version of Family Feud. Cute, right?

So, if you're familiar with Family Feud at all, you know that they survey 100 people, take their answers to random/weird questions, and make the contestants try to guess the top answers. So we surveyed--mostly science lectures--with our random questions and tallied up their answers. What do people wear everyday besides clothes? Jewelry. What are Clemson professor's pet peeves? Tardiness. What tells the time in your house besides a clock? Sundial.... yeah, sundial was the legit top response. I don't know what people were thinking. We also had one Einstein write 'bird'. If any of you can tell the time with a bird, I'd be interested to learn.

But the answer that I found most interesting was to the question: Something a picky girl finds wrong with her date?

Top Answer: Doesn't hold the door open for her.

This surprised me. Don't get me wrong, door-holding is important. It shows manners and courtesy and just makes me feel ladylike. But the top answer? Over clothes and hair? Really? I guess I just never realized how much emphasis we put on holding the door open.

We do need to take into account that this is the South. I've heard all the jokes, read the discussion boards, and as much as Northerners will try to deny it, the consensus seems to be that we Southerners are in general a politer bunch. Less straightforward, sure, and a heck of a lot more gossipy, but we've got ready-for-grandma manners out the wazoo.

So the fact that I go to a southern school chock-full of never-seen-snow-confederate-grandbabies probably affected the answer. But it did make me think about how much it means to me whether or not a man holds the door (or anybody, really. If you're walking in front of me and you let the door swing in my face, you are immediately on my shit-list). I went to camp my junior year of high school, where one of the counselors told us young ladies something we should live our lives by: If a man doesn't hold the door open for you, automatically check him off the 'possible husband' list. I found it a little extreme at the time, but I do find myself muttering 'jackass' under my breath and glaring at anybody who doesn't hold the door open. It's not hard! And it's just polite. At least, I thought it was polite until I found this little gem while researching:

Still, whether they're checking out our asses or not, it is apparently very important to women that their date holds the door open for them. So, gentlemen, if you want to impress your gal, here is a website that goes in depth into the intricacies of holding the door open. Enjoy, and don't let her know you're looking at her booty!

In other news, I have met a boy who holds the door...and buys me sandwiches and cookies without me asking...and says I have beautiful eyes...I pretty much want to scream into a pillow--and not the angry kind of screaming. The good kind. I'm not going to read too much into it though. I'm not. He seems like a bit of a flirt, so he probably doesn't mean anything by it. But it's always nice to hear you have beautiful eyes :)

For those of you keeping score at home, this isn't K, or should I say, Creepy K. This is...Rockstar. Let's call him Rockstar.

I am listening to Everybody Loves Me by OneRepublic.