Mmkay, so people have been wondering how Prom + Afterprom (Hypnosis) went...
It was pretty damn awesome. Prom started at 8:00 PM, and if you know the first thing about prom you know that you're not supposed to arrive on time. So I got there at 8:45 or so, got to take some photos and hang out with some friends.
A word here: Prom is not forced social interaction. (Tickets for Prom + Afterprom = $40, how can it be forced? :V) And it is shallow. But that is the point. I have been to hell and back with these fellow students of mine for the past
seven years together through IB. And we had to be deep and honest with one another, or we were going to fall apart. We have seen the darkness in one anothers' hearts, over time, and sometimes, it is a real relief to simply be able to come together and see one another in sexy, moderately overpriced clothes and be the shallow teenagers we
should have been otherwise.
So yeah. Prom went really well. The IB pretty much hijacked the voting for Prom King and Queen, like we always have, but this time we actually
succeeded (we've failed for the past two years). There was a whole lot of dancing, even some breakdancing, and for some reason all of the dances I had with my girlfriend ended up with grinding. Damn that girl.
Speaking of her, now that I've had a change of heart and I'm not going to the same college that she is (she's going to be off at Colorado College, I will be in Metro State), we've decided to formally split. Amicably, of course; we're still
best friends. So this is fine.
Anyway, the night went by with a whole lot of fun. I got to tease my other best friend Stephanie's boyfriend, since he's been a homeschooled boy all his life. It was too much fun to corrupt him. And everyone just looked so damn hot. Awesome. It was also pretty hilarious when the academic top ten were dirty dancing with one another. And since this is the week before hell, when IB tests start reaching a fever pitch... we were determined to have as much fun as we could before the final plunge. And we did!
Anyway, Prom itself ended at midnight. But a good amount of people stayed for the first official Afterprom we've had in years! (As opposed to other, smaller, unofficial Afterproms.) So because we had been on the third floor of Comedy Works (a comedians' haven in Denver), we went down to the first floor, where we got to take our seats.
And there came the Hypnotist! A cheerful, funny fellow. After making us do a basic autosuggestion exercise, he invited some people from the audience to come up, promising that he would later pick a few more groups. I determined that I would come up later with my friend Lammi, who was sitting to my left, and get hypnotized, but not before seeing what he did with the first group.
After putting on some violin music (I couldn't recognize the tune), he made them do a few arm rotation exercises, then switch directions at his call. Then as he kept repeating the same thing over and over again, I whispered to Lammi the two requirements for hypnotism to work that I had learned from the Psychology class kids (and the teacher, who was there too): First, you have to believe that hypnotism works. And second, you won't be made to do anything that you wouldn't want to do anyway. Apart from that, it's largely only suggestion. (I asked for more details, and the psych teacher wanted to explain, but then I figured out that she couldn't explain without utterly confusing me, since I took Human Rights and not Psychology as an SL.)
Anyway, as he went around closing their eyes, he would tap them on the shoulder and bid them go to sleep. And they did, mostly. Then he would go around to them and tap them individually on the shoulder, saying "The person that I'm tapping on the shoulder
[tap] now will wake up and every time I say the word 'Hypnosis', will jump up and say three times, 'It's fake, it's fake, it's fake!' and then fall back asleep again. They will jump up and say three times, 'It's fake, it's fake, it's fake!' and then fall back asleep again every time I say the word 'Hypnosis'." Then he would move on. (Being a literature geek, I noted the parallel sentence structure.) When he was done with everyone, he would snap his fingers, and everyone would wake up.
I mentioned to Lammi that I was curious to see the effects of hypnosis specifically on the IB students, since we're all a bunch of cynics and as such don't believe in hypnosis. As it turned out, it ended up outright not working on some of them, and some of the people on stage were indeed genuinely hypnotized, by all accounts. My friend JJ was very plainly not hypnotized, but she pretended she was by yelling "It's fake, it's fake, it's fake!" whenever the hypnotist said the word "Hypnosis". She's an actress, after all. But as the night progressed, more and more of them seemed to be, if not outright hypnotized, more and more prone to suggestions.
By and large, talking to them, they had really just been going along with what the hypnotist told them in order to make the audience laugh. Then they started to get more and more dazed, but they still were mostly in control of themselves. So no, I do not think that this hypnosis was real; it was pretty fake. I guess that's why it won't work if you don't believe in it; you must believe in it so that it will work. As such, it did work on some of them (the art teacher seemed to be particularly into it), but not all.
The reason that this report is like this is because I didn't get the chance to be hypnotized. :V When he sent them back to their seats, we realized it was 2:00 AM and that Afterprom was over. So we had to leave. Some people left to another guy's party off in Montebello, but I needed to go to a review session for our English IB test at 10:00 in the morning, so I went home, fell asleep for a few hours, went to school and practiced our Paper 2s, and have now come home to write this for you all.
Is that good enough of a report, then?
Do you know what it's like to try and concentrate on a project that's due in two days with a group of girls staring at you through window blinds?
We don't have windows, but apart from that, I do indeed know how that feels.
