Does everyone have a buddy?

Today I went on a field trip. Yes, a field trip. Around my own university campus with my 3000-level Arts and Entertainment Journalism class to look at public art.

At first, JM and I thought we would "get left behind by the group" along the way so we could write the thousands of words in essay due in the coming hours, days, weeks. But we employed the buddy system and took the tour. The pieces we looked at had surprisingly interesting back stories and it was nice to get out of the classroom, despite the numbness in our extremities that occurred. And who doesn't enjoy the occasional throwback to the days of elementary school? But it reminded me of some of the things I hate the most: looking like a tourist and doing group activities.

We were a small group. Maybe twenty people, tops. But as we travelled from art piece to art piece, an amorphous blob of chilly writers led by Catherine Elliot Shaw (the curator of Western's Macintosh Gallery), the only element missing that would have made us look even more like an adolescent tour group was brightly coloured lanyards with dangling cards identifying us as a unit. Or maybe matching t-shirts in bright colours, like they have for daycares. Or maybe a rope for all of us to be tied to so nobody would get lost…