Disclaimer: This story is a part of our April Fool’s edition, The Goofordian. This story was created by Guilfordian staff and is not based in fact.
Long before there was Guilford College, there was a Guilford College Indoors Club.
The Indoors Club was formed in response to a concerned Guilford County resident who thought that too many people spent too much time outside and thinking about nature.
The first meeting was held deep underground in the area which would one day become Bauman. The agenda included member beliefs about the weather, thoughts on recent media products, random academic trivia and the recitation of the Indoors Club motto “Nature is stupid.”
While some things, like our agenda, have not changed since our founding in 1836, as a member of the club, I am proud to say that other things have changed. The Indoors Club was originally very secretive and hidden, but it has now opened up to the public.
While there are many things that I love about the Indoors Club, there is one problem that I would like to mention.
I have found, from talking to the other members of the Indoors Club, that most of us do not actually know what a tree looks like in person. In fact, we are not entirely certain that nature is real.
We all spend a lot of time inside, so we do not really go out into the “natural” world very often at all. I think that we, as an organization, could be better about that and possibly go outside sometimes.
Whenever I mention going out into the sunlight, everyone thinks that I am joking. Lately when I mention going outside, reactions have ranged from laughter to outright fear and horror.
“Why would you want to go outside?” Indoors Club President and senior Emelia Finn said. “Bad things happen when we go outside. You know that.”
Finn has not gone outside since she was bitten by a mosquito last spring.
When I explained the conversations I have had with other members about nature, she became hostile.
“There is nothing out there for us,” said Finn. “It rejects us. We must reject it. If you have a problem with being indoors then you should join the Outdoors Club.”
Finn said all of this with the intense hatred of the Outdoors Club that all good Indoors Club members must cultivate and demonstrate before being accepted.
This deep hatred paired with a secret ritual that involves binging Netflix for 20 or more hours and then spending another 36 hours inside in complete darkness. Other qualifications include: knowing how to order takeout online, how to tweet about it to get coupons to use for next time and having a strong disbelief in global warming.
Other members also did not understand why we should know absolutely anything about nature.
“I don’t care about trees,” said first-year Winter Morris. “What have trees ever done for me? I read something on Buzzfeed that said they’re not actually real.”
Morris is not the only Indoors Club member with conflicted beliefs about the natural world.
“I’m 100 percent sure that nature is entirely made up,” said junior Theodore Smythe while angrily closing the blinds in his dorm room that he refused to leave for the interview. “All of this has been created by the Outdoors Club to try to get members. It’s like when they post pictures of ‘mountains’ or talk about ‘hiking.’ We all know they’re making it up.”
With membership to the Indoors Club growing with every weekly meeting, I want us all to think about nature and how we should be nicer to it since there is a very good chance that it is, in fact, real.
The next Indoors Club meeting will be on April 1 at 7 p.m. We will be showing “An Inconvenient Truth” along with other comedies in honor of April Fools’ Day. Everyone is encouraged to attend as long as they promise not to talk about trees or any other natural imagery. There has been a ban since our last meeting.
