What exactly is noping?
Have you ever heard the song "Chasing Cars"?
The chorus goes, "If I just lay here, will you lie with me and just forget the world?"
Ignoring the stanch grammatical crime this song commits (the first lay should be lie), we find in these beautiful lyrics a pretty good definition of noping. The song continues, "Let's waste time chasing cars around our heads." That is also a pretty good example of noping.
But for me, noping will forever be defined by the first time I encountered the term (though I am sure I had noped many a time before then).
It was a Wednesday night. I had spent, literally, all day in the library working on two research papers that I had put off until only a few days before their due date: Thursday at noon. My only break was to run over to a Prelaw Pie Social, of which I am a part only because of my status as editor of the Prelaw Reveiw. I didn't want to stay too long because, after all, I had essays to get back to, but I managed to stay just long enough to be one of the last remaining people and pick up an extra pie on my way out. I chose a banana cream, not because it had the most pie left to it (only myself and one other girl had had a slice), but because it's one of my favorites, so it was definitely a bonus that it was relatively untouched. I grabbed two plastic forks on my way out, because you never know what fate can throw at you--a strapping young man, a good friend . . . or perhaps, just two free forks. Either way, I figured they could come in handy.
From there, I rushed back to the library where I would be meeting a small group from my Mandarin class to practice for our final dialogue performance. Rachel, of course, was there, as were Eliza, Catherine, Maddie, and Emily, nearly all of whom will, as was intentionally planned, be joining me next semester in the same section of Mandarin part two.
Rachel had arrived to our study group slightly late because, with the basketball game and art auction, parking around campus had been horrendous. She had parked some ways to the northeast of campus at the parking for the freshman dorms, the ones I lived in my freshman year and that she will be moving to shortly.
As we were walking down the paved path to the dorms, Rachel went over to the high curb and sat down.
"You okay?" I asked.
"Yep," she responded, "I'm just gonna nope."
I had never heard such an expression before, but, perhaps because it was coming from Rachel, who verbs all the time, I knew exactly what she meant, and so I sat down to nope with her.
It was already dark out--nine o'clock or nine-thirty. It was cold enough that my jacket was necessary, but I had kept my coat draped over my arm as we'd walked. It was the ninth of December and there were scattered clumps of ,melting snow here and there, but so long as it wasn't snowing and it wasn't below freezing, I wasn't going to wear my coat.
From where we sat on the curb, we could look out on the west side of Provo. To our right was a bridge on which the traffic that Rachel would be headed into shortly had come to a near halt, and so, in part, it justified our noping. We decided we would wait for the traffic to clear up, realizing this could be a long wait. But the thing is, it didn't really feel like waiting. When you nope, if you do it properly, you don't take time into account anymore. This means I really have no idea how long we sat there talking. It also means I forgot all about the unfinished research papers waiting for me in the library.
At long last we got up and walked the rest of the way to her car.
I asked Rachel to drop me back off by the library. As I was grabbing the pie, I said to her, "Sorry, I would have offered it earlier, but I didn't want to break it out in our study group" (not to mention you're technically not supposed to have food in the library).
Long story short, my two forks proved serendipitous and insightful. Rachel pulled into a parking spot and we dug in and talked quite a bit more.
At some point in the conversation, Wikipedia was mentioned, and so I asked Rachel if she had ever played the Wikipedia game. She hadn't, and so, a game was in order. For those of you who are not familiar with this beautiful, addicting pastime, to play the Wikipedia game you need two devices that can pull up Wikipedia.com. Then, each player selects a random word. One word is entered into the search box and the game begins, with each player following links in the articles with the goal of being the first player to find a link to the second word.
For one of the rounds that Rachel and I played, I don't remember where we started, but we were headed to "balloon." I gave up on going the path of war and decided to start by finding "birth" and then "birthday party." Some time later, slightly frustrated at not being able to find it, I said to Rachel, "I have gone through every sexual organ!" which of course required some explanation. Rachel, meanwhile, was in Star Wars.
Eventually I found myself in obesity and other eating disorders and diseases, which lead me to "gastric balloon" which we decided was close enough. (A funny side note we discovered: "WWII" and "my little pony" are only two links away from each other).
It was almost 11:00 by the time I was headed back to finish my prison sentence in the library (I finished my papers shortly before the library would close at 2:00 am). It was a late night, but noping was worth it. It was so fun and relaxing, and I was much more productive because of it. I guess you could say that noping is a lot like demolishing a banana cream pie--it's good in most any proportion because it remains just as sweet with every bite. It's most enjoyable when you really ought not to be doing it. And it's best done with a friend and two plastic forks.
Candidly,
Cookie
