The Hug Fest

I had a great and happy weekend. It was hot and sunny pretty much all weekend, which is the kind of weather that makes me happy. One of my best friends is in town and we pretty much hung out all weekend and that made me happy. I had the new car to get around in all weekend so I didn’t have to wait at the bus stop sweating my ass off so that made me happy. Despite the fact that I didn’t get very much sleep this weekend due to too many beautiful reasons to list, I decided not to sleep the day away today which would have been so very easy to do. After I woke up, I showered and went to Market Square today. There’s a nonprofit around town that’s called K.P.I.F. or Knoxville Pays it Forward. They do a lot of different things to help people. They even gave me a bag of food for my kiddo one particularly rough week last winter. They are online so you can look them up if you feel like it. Anyway, today, they had a hug fest downtown. I saw it on Facebook and I thought it would be fun to go to. After all, who wouldn’t want to get a hundred hugs in two hours? So I was downtown for two hours in the blistering heat offering to give free hugs to passersby. I got to hold a bright neon pink sign that said “Free Hugs.” And people took full advantage of the free hugs. Of course there were some people who didn’t want to be touched, some because they had personal space issues, others because it was uncomfortably hot and they didn’t want to touch another hot sweaty person. I also got a hug from a one year old little girl who was the cutes thing and a great hugger. She hugged me twice. I found that kind of odd considering babies don’t typically like me. So the day was a success. The news was there, but since I don’t really watch the news, I don’t know if I was on it or not. I know my sign was. And it was really nice getting so many hugs.  I know I’m an affectionate person.  I love to touch people. It’s kind of my thing. It makes me happy to give massages or back rubs to people. I don’t even care if they are practically strangers. I will do it. It’s relieves my stress and I like knowing I relieved someone else’s stress.   My day was literally ten times  better from all the hugging. You cannot give people a hug and a smile and continue to be in a bad mood. I think my new goal will be to  start hugging hundreds of random strangers on a daily basis since I am obviously not ever going to find a boyfriend and since I don’t have very many huggers in my day to day life. And that’s just sad.