I’m sure everyone has seen a million YouTube videos of people going into public places and starting a synchronized dance or singing Christmas carols. These flash mobs have been everywhere lately, and I think they’re getting out of hand. I never paid attention to any of the flash mobs until one story on the Today Show caught my eye.

For those of you who don’t know, the official definition of a flash mob is, “a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then disperse.” And by official, I mean from Wikipedia.

I mean sure, they started off original and fun; however, they’re slowly moving more towards inconvenient and attention whoring.

I wasn’t too furious about these flash mobs until I saw the news story about a couple in Boston who decided to ditch the conventional church wedding and get hitched in Boston’s Prudential Center Mall.

Now sure, this is a fun, romantic way to get married, but other than that it’s just annoying. I hate going to the mall as much as any sane person does. You always seem to run into people you don’t want to see, there’s always Chinese food samples being thrown in your face and there’s always some lady screaming at her kid.

It’s just awkward. I do enjoy going to weddings, but those take some planning. I don’t want to just end up at a wedding. Sometimes you go to the mall to return some ugly sweater, and you just want to get in and out. You can’t just be thrown into a life-changing ceremony.

The groom was quoted as saying, “People came to the mall on their normal trajectories, and the idea was to hit them with a little bit of magic.”

That’s not magic; that’s just rude.

If you can actually see through this “creative” flash mob idea, you see the truth: they really just didn’t have anyone RSVP to their real wedding. No one wants to have a huge church rented out for a wedding, and the only people that show up are your dad and his new younger girlfriend. So why not just go into a public place already full of spectators?

I was thinking about doing the same thing. I could just go into the Student Center and read my column aloud. That’s a free audience. That way I can tell someone later that all of those people read my column. That’s not annoying; that’s just a loophole.

I’m not one to talk because my wedding is going to have fireworks, smoke machines, a moon bounce, etc., but at least I will give people the option of going to it.

Maybe I’m just a lot more polite than people from Boston.

Dylan Lusk is a sophomore electronic media production major, and a columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact him at [email protected].