The Facebook Viking Hat Chronicles – - It all Began with Lunch

You know, I didn’t just wake up one day and want to wear a Viking hat. Granted, it’s a perfectly PLAUSIBLE thing to happen in my world, but it just didn’t happen this time. THIS time, I have to…once again….blame Facebook.

Facebook is, I’m convinced, a strange, sometimes disturbing, fabulously inane, alternate universe where your past and present meet in some sort of quasi-reunion extravaganza. I could write an entire post regarding my feelings about it – - but today I am just going to write about one experience that has exploded into an inside joke of epic proportions in my life – - and that is “The Viking Hat Chronicles”.

You see, in the world of Facebook, you can log on and write anything that possibly enters your mind at that given moment and it shows up as your “status”. This status could say anything – - anything at all. ANYTHING. Which, for me (as I’m sure all of you know by now), is like receiving a beautiful, gold-leafed, elegantly scripted invitation to expound on every bizarre, twisted, pseudo-cerebral nugget of information that enters my head. And then the SCARY part is: everyone can see it. All 300 some-odd friends of past and present on your Facebook page: co-workers, a few family members, childhood friends, college friends, long distance friends, old boyfriends, elves, circus clowns, Jimmy Hoffa……….they all can SEE what you’ve written and then, what’s more, HAVE AN OPINION ON IT.

On the day that the Viking Hat Strangeness began, earlier that afternoon I’d had lunch with a friend at a nearby quirky little restaurant – - and on the wall of this restaurant was a painting of a Viking. He was a stern looking Viking – - with a red beard and beady little narrowed eyes which seemed to say “If I weren’t locked up in this painting, I would kick over every table in the room, drag out all the screaming women by their hair, and then burn down the restaurant with the fire that I breathe from my mouth” This caused my friend and me to ponder about whether any kinder, gentler Vikings existed. Maybe one who knitted afghans and quietly read romance novels by the fire, while the rest of his brethren went out to do their daily raping and pillaging. And whether this Viking would have been shunned by all the other Vikings because he wasn’t mean enough to hack it in the Viking’s world of conquering peaceful villages.

With all this on my mind, I came home, and opened my newly acquired book on Iceland – - because in parallel to the Viking painting, I had also been having thoughts about Vikings in relation to Iceland since I’ve become obsessed with the thought of visiting there – - so I’d bought a book on a whim recently to nurture this desire and keep it rolling around in my brain. I’m much more want to create action that way, I’ve found.

As I read this book and pondered the lunch conversation – - I looked at the laptop on my coffee table and thought that perhaps the World of Facebook might want to know my thoughts on this subject matter. Just like I wonder if they might want to know my thoughts when I type out my statuses about tater tots, my Thursday afternoon desire to be an 80′s Rap Star, and my opinion that if Jabba the Hutt had a lesser-known southern cousin in the universe, his name would be Hank. Hank the Hutt.

And so what I blasted off towards Planet Facebook on that particular day was this statement: Amy is reading about Iceland and wondering if there were ever any kind Vikings. And if they were shunned by the Rape and Pillage Vikings?

Whenever I post a thought, I am often surprised by what will catch a person’s attention. Sometimes a status that I think is pretty dadgum funny will be passed over completely, leaving a ghost town of non-commentary around my lonely status – - tumbleweeds blowing down the streets of my vacant attempt at humor. Other times, something completely off-handed that I write on a whim without thinking about it much will garner tremendous response. I almost want to say “But I didn’t even TRY to be funny on this one, People!”

On the day of the Viking comment – - I was somewhere in between these two extremes. While I had obviously been pondering this thought on that day, I honestly didn’t think many people would care about it. So I put it out there and then began to peruse other parts of Facebook, like taking another “My Personality Quiz” or perhaps send a Chuck Norris snow globe to some lucky person’s wall with the Snow Globe Application. So much time to waste on Facebook – - so many applications with which to waste it.

But suddenly I noticed a comment underneath the status – - then another and another. People were making hypotheses about whether the kinder, gentler viking would listen to Bjork or not – - another theorized that his name would be Norval and a children’s book should be written about him. Or better yet, someone added, how about a musical!!!!?? Oh this was good…this was really good! This was better than Chuck Norris snow globes – MUCH better. No sooner had we ventured down the avenue of the musical possibilities, when some of my European friends who’d actually VISITED and/or studied Iceland began chiming in with facts about Iceland. We were informed that Bjork is sooooo yesterday. That the Iceland young folk were now listening to Sigur Ros. And that an actual real, historic Viking was named….get this…… Snorri. Snorri Sturluson. You could almost feel the collective groan from everyone in the commentary thread because, let’s face it, “Snorri” is a profoundly disappointing name for a real Viking. Snorri is the name of a kid whose lunch money gets stolen on the playground and has to carry around a large box of kleenex to accommodate his chronic nose-running problem. And what was MORE, Snorri had a girlfriend who was named “Oddny”. “Well that’s odd”, we all thought.

All told, there were 72 comments contributed to that conversation from people all over the world from all avenues of my life. A Kumbayah moment taken directly out of an episode from The Twilight Zone. And aftershocks occurred in the days following from this conversation including my request to my friend Murdo to do some Viking hat photo shops that were brilliant. This one was used as my profile picture for over a month:

Based on this profile photo, I got much commentary from people both publically on my Facebook page, and privately via e-mail, discussing the Viking Hat – - wanting to know the story of the Viking hat. Some people didn’t care about the story behind the Viking hat, they just loved the idea of me wearing a Viking hat and really didn’t ask WHY I was wearing it. Which, frankly, is a tiny bit worrisome, because it means that people just accept the fact that it’s a perfectly NORMAL thing for me to do. When would people start worrying? If I was dressed up as a demented clown? Or perhaps photographed myself in a George Washington costume eating some pop tarts? What would it take to garner concern that maybe…..maybe…this time, I’ve TOTALLY lost my Raman Noodles? (A request though – - if you think I HAVE gone ’round the bend, please don’t tell my mother your concerns because she’ll call me up and tell me that I will feel much better if I would just clean my house. To my mother, a clean house is the prescription for any mental malady. And George Washington eating pop tarts would cause her to prescribe a REALLY BIG deep cleaning of my house. And I don’t want to.)

Anyway…a few weeks ago, out of the blue, my college friend Heather sent me a note telling me that she had a Viking hat for me. “What??? WHAT????”, I said. “Gimme! GIMME NOW!!!” She said that in a few achingly long days, this piece of plastic horned goodness would be in my hot, greedy little hands. But before she sent it, she took this photo of herself in it:

Do you see? Do you see how the disease has begun to spread? Like some sort of Icelandic fungus…

After I received the hat, and got over my cold, about a week later, I subjected my friend Melissa to the Viking hat while she cooked me dinner when house-sitting for a friend. She wore the hat with pride the entire time she was cooking and let me chronicle the event on film. I think that the hat gave her super human cooking powers because that meal ROCKED:

So be warned, people. What started with a few comments on Facebook is now sweeping the nation – - the world! And if you come into contact with me, then you will likely come into contact with the Viking hat in the near future – - and I WILL take a photo of you in it. Just say a little prayer that I won’t make you pose like this in it (cue my mother calling me RIGHT NOW to tell me I need to clean my tub thoroughly):