Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn’t keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn’t playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.
There’s hiding and there’s finding, we’d say. And he’d say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we’d all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn’t play with him anymore if he didn’t get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He’s probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.
As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, “GET FOUND, KID!” out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It’s real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.
A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn’t want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn’t need them, didn’t trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn’t say good-bye.
He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. “I don’t want anyone to know.” “What will people think?” “I don’t want to bother anyone.”
Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.
Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.
“Olly-olly-oxen-free.” The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says “Come on in, wherever you are. It’s a new game.” And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.
— Robert Fulghum, “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten”
since regrettably most of my followers aren’t vietnamese, i’d like y’all to know that the vietnamese language is pretty moderately gendered, most of our honorifics are gendered, so nonbinary vietnamese people have been creating their own gender neutral pronouns like by combining “chị” (girl older than you) and “anh” (dude older than you) into chanh, but chanh is also the word for lemon lol. so for a short while lemons became a symbolic nonbinary thing, but some nonbinary viets were like hmm we don’t like how that pronoun is defined by a gender binary so they created a new pronoun, “cam” which means “orange” like the fruit lmaoo
[Image description: a parody of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The anguished human figure in the foreground of the original has been replaced by the meme of “Surprised Pikachu.” Description ends.]
No joke is one-size-fits-all, but adding “but I remain optimistic” at the end of any somewhat-speculating statement makes it funny, taking a different tone in each.
Adding it to the end of something positive gives it an unexpected twist - implying that whatever the good thing that happened was, it wasn’t what you expected or hoped to happen, but you’re yet to give up hope of whatever the fuck you’ve now vaguely implied towards might still happen. “He survived and is expected to make a full recovery, but I remain optimistic.”
Adding it to a neutral statement implies that you think something can be done about it, funniest if the statement is something that obviously can’t be affected. “Apparently it’s tuesday tomorrow, but I remain optimistic.”
And the bleakest, most hopeless statements just become bleakly funny by the grim absurdity. “About 30 seconds remain until impact, and the chances of any of us surviving the crash are zero. But I remain optimistic.”
With vanilla extract being a meme, I wanted to share some black history of Edmond Albius a black slave who revolutionized vanilla pollination.
He used a technique he learned of pollinating melons to polinate the orchids to create the vanilla beans. Vanilla was rare and a luxury mainly due to only being able to be pollinated by its natural pollinator in Mexico.
unfortanely, he didnt receive any money for his discovery despite being called the main man who revolutionized pollination, he died in poverty…
i feel like so many people misunderstand redemption arcs. they’re not about forgiving past actions. they’re not about softening previous behavior. redemption arcs are about realizing past behavior was heinous and resolving to be better, do better. that’s why so many redemption arcs fall apart upon close scrutiny.
