"Humans of New York," and why I retain hope for humanity

There is an excellent Facebook page called "Humans of New York," and it has actually played a fair role in my life. It is run by a photographer who lives in (spoiler alert): New York City. He takes street portraits of people and asks them questions. Now, this in itself may seem fairly unremarkable, but please take this story as an example. The photographer is the voice asking the questions; the man in the photo is the one who answers and speaks first.

(Disclaimer: Obviously, I copied the following story and image from HONY's page. I don't own any of it).

"I've been examining my values lately, and determining whether or not I like the feelings that result from those values."
"What's an example of one of your values?"
"I'm very competitive."
"And what's a feeling that results from being competitive?"
"Jealousy."
"How does competitiveness result in jealousy?"
"When you have a competitive mindset, you tend to view the world in terms of winners and losers. So you resent other people getting recognition, because you somehow believe that less recognition is available to you. I'm learning that this is a false mindset. There's not a fixed amount of success and recognition in the world. So another person's accomplishments don't diminish the accomplishments available to you."

What fascinates me most about HONY is merely his ability to capture deep sketches of real people that he has never met before. (Not to mention how outgoing he needs to be to do that, but maybe I only take note of that because I'm an introvert). When I see someone when I'm in public, say, on the Metro, the stranger and I are generally both in what is known to actors as "first circle:" the impersonal, self-absorbed realm, in which the people in the interaction (if you can even call it that) make no attempt to connect whatsoever. The stranger has stories, and I have stories. But all we will ever know of each other is based solely on the physical, if we even take the time to glance at one another. When I scroll through HONY's page, I get to see a web of stories that are disparate yet interconnected; touching and insightful, or funny and lighthearted; heart-wrenchingly sad, or sweet and innocent. Basically, it's a place where everyone gets to tell their story: whether they're perceived by society as someone invisible, like a garbage worker, or if they're hilariously flamboyant and irrevocably noticeable. 

When I think about HONY, there are two thoughts that strike me the most. The first is that despite the masks we put on-- class markers, facial expressions, clothing-- nobody is as different as we like to believe. We all share in a common humanity, and trying to escape that would be like trying to drain the blue from the sky and the green from the grass. We're different, undoubtedly, and that is a wonderful thing. But we often get caught up in that and forget how much we truly share. 

The second thought is that when I look at the simple (or complex) wisdom of ordinary people, I realize that I'm not giving humanity enough credit. I look at the things going on in the world: hunger, wars, oppression, and just plain, everyday meanness, and I often despair. But it is the majority; the ordinary, everyday people, who will ultimately make a difference in the future. Not some group of politicians: the everyday humans who constitute the biggest part of the global population. And just by getting a small glance at what these ordinary people think about through HONY, I honestly don't feel so dejected. Yes, there are a lot of problems in the world, and yes, they're horrible. People kill each other. People emotionally abuse other people. People are denied what we all agreed long ago were basic human rights: education, happiness, the right to marry the person you love, etc. But we are not without hope. And this Facebook page is just something that helps remind me of that.

As someone truly great once said: Ta ta for now!

~Maddie

I wrote a thing...

Hello, lovelies.

I am taking a short break from studying madly and coughing up my lungs to post a short...thing. I don't know if it's a poem, a short story or an essay, but I do know that I wrote it (that is, unless someone has played a very clever joke on me and I only think that I wrote it). I wanted to post my first draft on this blog. Yes, it's still in draft format, so any input sent via comment or the communication widget on the right of your screen would be greatly appreciated, because it's still at that early stage of life where I can't tell if it's absolute rubbish or not.

~Maddie

Forever Almost

A thing, by Maddie.

If I loved you, I would love you in the complete and indisputably, unquestionably existent way that the wind blows through branches in October, creating fingers of air that, just for a fleeting instant, are solid enough to shake down dead leaves and toss them into a stormy sky, to turn and flip in one final celebration of a vitality already lost. I would love you in a way that just happens, so normal and so right that no one thinks about it, like the clockwork heartbeat of the universe. I would write you songs that could freeze snowflakes in the air and leave them there to hang, as specks of lace trapped in an immortal beam of cold afternoon light. I would sing down the moon and the stars and all the planets for you, and then launch them back into the sky to hover more brightly and more brilliantly than they ever could have before.

If I loved you, I never would have expected to. My love would be the lazy, slinky light that seeps in through the window at about four o’clock in the afternoon, and reminds me that even though the morning was full of life, the late, sluggish hours of the day will still slink in and claim my productivity as they trap sparkling dust in their glittering wakes. Though I forget this will ever happen, it does, as surely and as predictably and as beautifully as it can. You would have crept up on me, becoming an integral and irreplaceable part of my life before I even had the sense to stop and catch my breath.

I would tell you wonderful things, if I loved you. All those secrets that I have been saving for the one I love would be yours, by right of birth. I would tell you the word that means the smell of puddles, dirt and worms right before it has finished raining. I would show you all the ways that I hide my soul in plain sight. As we would lie down on our backs to look at the late September sky, I would talk about reds and yellows and blues, but mostly blues, because they are my favorites. And you would tell me things, too.

If, someday, you read this, then the future from this point, this fleeting and pregnant now will have laid itself out along the pebbled path of my imagination, to meander down streets held up by cafes and cobblestones and clouds and glass windows and the smell of books and the probable freckles on your nose. If you never read this, someone else will, someday. If you never read this, I wonder if you will know that you were my almost someone, and I yours. I wonder if one day, when your grandchildren are out of the house and you look up at the October sky, if you will remember our small, wind-tossed dance of possibility. And then the dead leaves will sink to the ground, and the memory will once again be claimed by the past.

Project 365 New Things: Day 4

Today I learned how to mend a broken nail with a tea bag. Now, before you tell me how hopelessly boring a skill this is, let me assure you that it was out of necessity rather than just for fun. Ouch. I had so much work to do today that I decided just to count that as today's challenge, because I actually hadn't done it before.

Basically, you cut a nail-sized piece out of the tea bag mesh, glue it onto the nail (I used a glue stick, as I am truly lazy), and then put on clear nail polish to keep it on. And it actually worked pretty well.

And then, because I am truly talented in the art of hurting myself, I topped it off with a Sesame Street band-aid, because yesterday I cut myself a knife bit me. I am actually really happy about the artistic content of my band-aid, and have been wearing it with pride and joy. Why don't big people get cool band-aids anymore!? I'm going to go to the store and buy a whole box of princess and/or Sesame Street band-aids the next chance I get.

And now, I have a special announcement.

My good friend, who is calling herself Cassandra for the purposes of the blogging world, has been following along with the challenge for the past couple of days. If I can speak for her for a moment, she has really been enjoying it. She decided yesterday to start her own blog, so that she can record her own 365 new things as well as opinions and thoughts and other bloggy material. Please check it out! Her url is fireiceeverythingnice.blogspot.com. I'm just pleased that other people are invested in this too, and it's not just me being crazy :)

I've got some ideas for tomorrow. Stay tuned! :)

~Maddie

Project 365 New Things: Day 2

I did an art!

I've seen this done a couple times, and I've desperately wanted to try it for a while. I used my hot glue gun to place the crayons on the canvas, and then I took a hair dryer and melted the crayons. Things learned: use newspaper underneath. Pink doesn't like to do as it's told. Don't overdo it with the hairdryer. And no matter how hard you try, the colors won't melt in exactly the way that you want them to, though the end result is probably prettier than you could have imagined. I am vaguely aware that this last observation, with a bit of tweaking, could become a rather soppy and rainbow-y metaphor for life, but I've decided not to bother too much with that one.

Now, I want to know: does the art look better like this:

Or on its side, like this?

By the way, if you're doing the project too (I know a few of you said you were going to), go ahead and comment what you did for a particular day on my corresponding post! I'm honestly having a ball with this project so far, and I'd love to hear what all of you have been up to.

Yours in spontaneity and rainbow-y-ness,

~Maddie

365 New Things

Recently, I was thinking about how to make the world a more interesting place. I thought that a good way to bring this about would be if every person on the earth did just one thing each day that they'd never done before. This thing could be anything, from going to a new country to taking a shower with the lights out.

I thought about this some more, and then I realized that since I am the only person in the world who I can completely control, I would do it myself. So, beginning tomorrow, for the next year, this blog will focus primarily on this project I have decided to attempt. I'll still keep posting the usual content, but every day, starting tomorrow, I will write about the new thing that I tried for the first time that day.

This should be interesting. I look forward to September 6th of 2014. I can't wait to find out about all the things I did, and if I actually stayed on task and finished the project.

I'd love to hear any thoughts about this. Also, I'm open to ideas of new things I could try each day.

~Maddie

How To Be Classy and Aloof Without Getting Kicked Out of Public Places: A Guide

Many of the thousands of my adoring fans often ask me how I manage to be so suave, so classy, and so spiffing. They plead with me to tell them how I manage to have such a marvelous air of je ne sais quoi about me, wherever I go. And so, this guide is for you: How To Be More Classy and Enigmatic: A List, By Maddie. 

(Note: the following guide may also be helpful if you wish to enhance your steampunk personality). 

(Another note: if you do not know what steampunk is, firstly, I feel sorry for you, and secondly, nothing is stopping you from going and looking it up).

(Yet another note: in this post, I'm kidding a lot of the time. Please don't arrest me or actually adopt a pet raven).

1. Stop using predictable colloquialisms. When Humphrey Bogart bade farewell to Ingrid Bergman in The Maltese Falcon, did she get into that plane, look down at him for the last time, and say 'YOLO'? No, she did not, and you shouldn't, either. When you text, use full sentences and proper punctuation. No abbreviations. In your spare time, work to improve your vocabulary. Read the dictionary for fun, and make sure that people walk in on you while you do so. Use words like "milieu," "idiosyncratic," and "dirigible" in everyday conversation as much as you can. Learn to enunciate properly. Proper usage of the word 'whom' is a must. And remember, as somebody clever once said on the internet: never underestimate the flirtatious power of a decent vocabulary.

2. Adopt a signature item of clothing. What do Indiana Jones, BBC's Sherlock Holmes, Captain Jack Sparrow and the Tenth Doctor all have in common? They each have a signature item of clothing, of course. A signature item of clothing, be it a hat, a blue scarf, or a trench coat, does not only serve a functional and stylistic role; it gives a person a sort of marker, to identify them from the vastly less interesting members of the human race. While the rest of your personality, motivations and mannerisms may be shrouded in mystery, unpredictability and the exploits derived from your fascinating mind, that signature clothing item gives your followers something predictable and understandable about you. Because people can pin point and understand the fact that Sherlock Holmes wears a blue scarf, the rest of him becomes all the more enigmatic by comparison. Don't chose something loud; I favor a pocket watch, and (when the weather is permissible) a leather trench coat. Subtlety is key here. Unless you are the 11th Doctor (and I imagine that this is a relatively small portion of my readership). In which case, fezzes, bow ties and stetsons are allowed, because you are a lovely man.

3. Read books. I cannot stress enough the importance of this rule. If one is to become truly mysterious and classy, one must be well-read. Read up on the latest news and scientific theories, to be sure, but do not neglect the classics. Make occasional intelligent and obscure literary references in regular conversation, especially if you know that no one in the room will understand them. Develop an opinion about the Oxford comma.

4. Acquire a sidekick or companion. As Sherlock Holmes once said to John Watson, "That's the frailty of genius, John. It needs an audience." You must have a companion who simultaneously understands why you are so misunderstood and who makes you look smarter than they are. It is also helpful to find one who cooks, because, as we geniuses know, one can become so involved in research or experiments that it becomes difficult to remember to eat regularly.

5. Move into a dark mansion with a study and a library. What is more satisfying then saying dramatically "I'll be in the study," slamming a pair of heavy wooden doors, and sinking into a leather chair behind a desk in a room walled by book shelves to have a good, old-fashioned, solitary brooding session? Oak furnishings, candles, quill pens, leather-bound books, bronze or iron accents, obscure objects from around the world, large and impressive oil portraits of historical people and oriental rugs are a must. 

6. Develop a side interest. These days, every decent genius has a side interest, it seems. One must have something to do whilst unwinding from a long day of scheming, experimenting, or adventuring. Do not chose the violin, as that has been done before. Beekeeping, composing, breeding goldfish, taxidermy, gardening, creating different blends of tea, collecting antique maps and horseback riding are all suitable options. Remember: your side interest cannot be too closely related to your main work, be that research, armchair adventuring, airship captaining, exploring distant regions, political scheming, etc. I repeat: a small touch that humanizes you can make the rest of you seem all the more mysterious by comparison.

7. Have excellent hair. The Tenth Doctor. Princess Leia. Albus Dumbledore. Need I say more?

8. Learn to read people. Though some of you may accuse me by now of being far too obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, I must stress that the ability to read people is invaluable and should not be viewed exclusively in the narrow light of the Holmes universe. It is not only a survival skill, but it helps one get a better grasp of social situations-- and being reasonably socially adept is essential if one wishes to be classy. The best way to learn these skills? Sit on a park bench and watch people for a day. Write down observations in a notebook. You'll learn more than any psychologist or Conan Doyle novel could tell you. A note: do not walk up to people, introduce yourself, and begin to deduce them out loud. This only serves to create social tension, resentment and awkwardness. And that, as I'm sure you've picked up by now, is not behavior exhibited by the truly classy. Also, if you behave in an off-putting manner, this will not only create the uncomfortable environment I have just mentioned, but it will rob you of further opportunity to learn about that person.

9. Things to do: Be somewhat solitary without being a recluse. Learn your manners. Use sarcasm and deadpan humor discreetly and infrequently, but to great effect. Drink lots of tea. Wear sunglasses. Keep a journal, and perhaps call it a 'log.' Don't call your front yard a 'lawn' or a 'yard.' Call it 'the grounds.' Learn another language. Get a raven or a tame wolf. Invest in a decent set of candelabras.

10. Things to avoid: Don't speak in an accent unless you can definitely pull it off. Act mysteriously and intriguingly aloof, but not rude or off-putting. Whatever you do, DON'T adopt a tagline. 

I hope this guide helps you to achieve your mysterious and misunderstood dreams.

DFTBA,

~Maddie

Million-Dollar Idea

You, dear reader, will do well to become my friend now. Why? Because it will serve you very well in about ten years. Why is that, Maddie? you ask.

Well, gentle friend, I just came back from what we non-athletic types call "a very spontaneous and unexpectedly barefoot walk/run/jog/trot thing." And while I was sort of loping along the sidewalk, I thought of a million-dollar idea.

Now, this in itself is not all that remarkable. I come up with million-dollar ideas quite often, usually when I'm talking to my best friend Elli or my online-Nerdfighter-friend-who-unfortunately-lives-multiple-states-away-from-me, Drew. My collaborations with these two include a Chinese restaurant/theme park/spa staffed by a viking, a shoe store for people with only one half of a body (think Phantom Tollbooth-style, non-gory, split down the middle), and a new genre of music: Shakespeare rap. (While we're on the subject, I believe I am currently the only artist to have rhymed the words "enigmatic" and "demographic" in a rap song). But I digress.

I do believe that this million-dollar idea surpasses most that I've had before. Now, sit back, relax, and let me pitch it to you:

You know those smells that everyone seems to know, but do not tend to be unduly celebrated by the human race? I'm talking about that slightly sweet, slightly bready air-freshener-like smell that you get in the houses of some kinds of old people. Or the smell of play-doh. The smell that a house gets when there are a lot of dogs in it. The smell of Subway restaurants. I could go on, but I'm pretty sure you know what I'm talking about at this point: the kinds of smells that no one thinks too much about, but when you mention them, everyone in the conversation knows what you're talking about.

Well, imagine this: you walk into your apartment, and suddenly you can't shake the feeling that there is somehow, inexplicably and against all reason, an dog in the room. You don't own a dog, and your husband insists that there is no dog in the room, that he hadn't even seen a dog that day, etc. Then, you look at the calendar and realize that it's April 1st. Your husband admits to having bought the Nose-Fooler: a brand new product that diffuses just enough of a scent that the brain picks it up and puts on the there's-a-dog-in-this-room alert. Or an old person. Or a bucket of play-doh. You get the idea.

Yes, friends. I have just invented a product that plays pranks using the victim's own nose. And now, I present to you some questions: what scents would you buy, once my fabulous products rolls out to A Store Near You? Also, I recognize that "The Nose-Fooler" is an incredibly lame name. Thoughts?

I'm gonna be rich, I tell you. Rich.

~Maddie

In Which Maddie Gets Perhaps a Bit Too Philosophical About Squirrels

Today, my sister and her friend found a squirrel on the road. He was injured. Maybe he fell out of a tree, or got hit by a car. We'll never know for sure. I walked to the spot with my rabbit's pet carrier as fast as I could.

I tried to ask my mom and the squirrel rehab lady on the phone every possible question I could, in the thin hopes that one of them would be met with "oh, we didn't think of that! Let's try it. Maybe we can save him." (And yes, we know a squirrel rehab lady). But, of course, it didn't happen like that. It never does. The fact was, he couldn't move his front arms. One of them seemed to be abnormally small. Because of this, he had been trying to drag himself along the road when we found him, and his chin was hairless and bloody from being scraped along the asphalt as he tried to free himself from danger, or pain, or fear, or whatever was going on in his head. Because his mouth was injured and he couldn't walk, there was no way that he could feed himself. He was an adult, and so there was no way to acclimate him to humans. If we had left him on the road, he would have become live bait. Euthanizing him was the kindest option.

At least, that's what everyone kept telling me. I kept it to myself, but the whole time I was in the car, with his carrier clutched firmly on my lap, staring at his madly twitching back legs and the fear beyond all comprehension in his eyes, I wondered if it really was the kindest option. Squirrels are used to the out-of-doors. Everyday can contain a life-and-death struggle for them. Predators were something that he doubtless understood, something that was in his personal lexicon of understanding. At least he would have had some idea of what was happening to him while crows pecked him to death or a fox made a meal of him.

I'm not saying it would have been pleasant for him. If I could possibly have spared him from it, I'd have done it in a heartbeat. But there is a kind of unspeakable horror that I don't think humans, as inquisitive and thus incredibly knowledgeable beings, can fully understand, and I saw it in his face. It comes with the complete loss of any understanding of what is happening to you. In a sense, picking him up and putting him in my rabbit's pet carrier and driving him to the animal shelter was taking him completely out of the context of his own species. He had no frames of reference with which to process what was happening to him, and so his mind resorted to the only emotion, if you can call it that, that was anything like what was going through his head: the most pure panic I have ever seen. Trying to understand human horrors with a squirrel's mind would be enough to induce wild, clawing, frantic, all-encompassing terror in any creature. Blood, wind, dirt, food, teeth, injury, trees, rain, grass, dogs and running for his life were things that he understood. There was no way to explain to him what was happening. I would rather be ripped to shreds by something I understood than to be subjected to a nameless horror beyond my understanding and then killed. Sure, getting a euthanizing shot is a much less painful manner of death than getting eaten. But when you don't have the ability to understand the former, it's infinitely more scary and horrible.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're all wrong. All human ideas are from, well, humans. The best we can do to test whether they're right or not is to live by them, but we'll never know what "right" and "wrong" really are, anyway, other than by making wild stabs in the dark by ourselves. The only assurance we have that we are "right" is from other members of our own species. This is fine for human matters, but when our choices affect members of other species, we have nothing beyond guesses as to what the outcome will really be in their opinions. All I know is that I wasn't able to ask the squirrel which way that he would have preferred to die, and it made me more upset than I've been in a while.

Because I couldn't get into his mind, and he couldn't get into mine, I did human things to try to make him feel better. I know it's a bit silly because it probably only served to make me feel better when it should have been him, but I didn't know what else to do. I talked to him. I told him what was happening. I tried to stop him from butting his head against the side of the carrier. I quietly sang him the song that my dad always sang to me when I was little and upset. He was so scared that I'm not exaggerating or being fanciful when I say that if I concentrated, I could feel his fear in the air around him. I think that perceiving the emotions of other creatures in that way, human or not, is something that many of us forget to take the time to do.

I decided to call him Hephaestus, after the Greek god. Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera, king and queen of all the gods. When he was born, he had a deformed leg. Because of that, Hera decided that he shouldn't live, and tried to end his life by tossing him off of a mountain. But Hephaestus fell into the sea, where he grew up and learned to make beautiful things, instead of dying, which people expected him to do. I didn't tell anyone else that I'd named him that, because I didn't want them to argue with me and try to call him something else.

I carried him on my lap the whole way to the animal shelter, and as I carried him out of the car I tried to hold the carrier so that he could see the grass if he wanted to. As his carrier sat on the counter, I looked at him, and thought "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Maybe he understood me. Maybe he didn't. I tried to communicate the thought by projecting my emotions towards him, which I know sounds stupid to you, but that's because you're human and you're used to communicating through other methods. Animals communicate like that all the time. The last I saw of Hephaestus was his bushy tail, as the volunteer carried him into the back room. When she came back, the carrier was empty, and so was Hephaestus.

I like to think of the world as a web of stories. Everyone and everything is and has a story: you, me, people you've never heard of, snails, that guy you saw picking his nose at the bus stop, your mother, the tree in your backyard, and the pair of shoes you bought at the thrift stop. No one will ever completely know the full story of any single object or person. It's just too much information. People affect people in ways that nobody ever fully realizes. Maybe a man you will never meet was late for work one day because a woman he will never meet bought the last tube of toothpaste at the store the previous week and so he had to go buy some before leaving the house, and he ran so fast that he knocked over a trash can in the park, and a plastic cup from that trash can rolled until it hit the sidewalk, and you saw a woman trip over it and that's how you met your wife. That's what happens when the stories bump into each other.

I will never know Hephaestus's story, or why his bumped into mine. But I'm glad it did, even though it makes me sad that his life ended. From every story that bumps into mine, I try to learn new ideas. That helps me find a spot for myself in the one, big story that is our existence as members of this planet. I'm not going to say which ideas exactly I got from today's story collision, because I want to you get ideas of your own from it.

Good luck with your stories.

~Maddie