people-pleasers

I met coworker #8 at a coffee shop over the road from work at 9:30 in the morning. 8 is a good chat because we have the same job and can compare notes. He is also sweet to a fault. He is a solar farm for emotion, every cell tilted at the beams of heartbreak and bittersweetness that blast down at us little humans. This is something he says he is working on: feeling everything. I like to share with him my experience of being unskinned on the way into parenthood, as if it will help. I absolutely get it!! I say, trying to show where the gaps are so big you can touch bone, making it all about me. New York City is great because it’s hard to think it’s about you for very long.

While 8 and I were sitting at a wobbly circle table with our coffees, a man dashed up to the counter, grabbed the tip jar, ran to the door, and then stopped and turned. Standing in the doorway with the giant plastic TIPS jar at his chest—a sawn—off water cooler, I believe—he yelled, "It's an emergency!" then tore off like Microsoft clipart.

The two baristas shrugged. One said, "New York, man," and then retrieved a new TIPS jar from under the counter.

I didn't understand what had happened right in front of me until 8 explained. What? I said. WHAT!

8 took it all in, his eyes slightly fuzzy. "I feel so bad for that guy," he said. He was thinking about all the unhoused people out there.

This is of course the same coffee chain that previously wouldn’t give me the bathroom code until I PROVED I was a paying customer. I ordered a $6 Honey Badger cold brew there once that was so sweet it was undrinkable. The fact that the robber stopped in the door to try and explain himself is what got me later. He stole the tip money (probably not much since everyone uses the computer screen to tip?), but still wanted people to understand. And 8 floated over from his latte to offer understanding where he really didn't need to. A strange dance of people-pleasing.

*

"People-pleasing" is very looked down-upon. Something to cull from your personality. Which is easy for the jerks to advocate. But what about those of us who are good at it! What if, instead of thinking I'm a silly loser for putting in all the effort for hopeless people, we thought: man, how lucky are we to have the people-pleasers among us, making the banter! Who do things they don't need to do, driven by the idiotic motivation of making someone else happy? What if people-pleasing is just part of not being a psychopath? That brings me to kids.

Japhy did his Christmas shopping at school again, and bought his grandfather a tie, and Noodles a packet of car fresheners—things he thought would delight. Scout exists in a perpetual state of people-pleasing punctuated by jots of adrenal shutdown, so it’s harder to pull out a discrete example from the sea of thoughtful acts, but this old card I found captures the gist of it:

I bet she writes that on everyone’s card

It’s also just how we parent: everything is conditioning, the stupid parenting strategies and the good ones. Here is how to please me, we say, putting another laminated chore chart on the fridge. Our school cajoles good behavior through an elaborate casino front of daily and weekly bribes (mostly candy). No kind deed goes unrewarded, since the school will announce you as having been “caught soaring” and exchange whatever internal glow you have for a purple certificate and lollipop.

I listened to a dream crossover between Looking at Picture Books and

The Mother of it All

podcast the other day (Mac and Jon and Miranda and Sarah!). In it, Mac Barnett had a great bit about how you’d laugh along with adult skits as a kid (his example is the Phil Hartman Reagan War Room sketch from SNL), and Jon Klassen talked about how kids have to work all day long to try and understand the adult world, or make peace with not really getting it:

“Kids, you’ll drive for an hour and they don’t understand a thing they’ve seen out the window for an hour and they are fine with that, they’re like, ‘I don’t know what any of those signs said, I don’t know where we started, I don’t know where we are, but I’m going to go where I’m told right now because we’re getting out of the car.’ And their ego isn’t threatened by that because it’s their whole day.”

You often see lazy jokes about how kids are psychopaths, when they’re actually working way harder to get your POV.

I try to remember to tell S and J how happy they make me just by being around.

*

Some months ago, Noodles was running the Hudson River bike path (he is always doing this) and he came upon a short older woman who is always walking the reverse direction with her sausage dog. They have become acquainted through dozens of breezy “hi”s on the path, and that day she had not witnessed a murder, but found the body on the bike path, and needed help getting the police to come. Noodles helped, but the best was that the different city police departments were both claiming it wa the other’s jurisdiction since it was in the middle of nowhere on the bike path.

Noodles ran into the sweet little woman again the other day, and got an update. They still haven’t found the murderer, but, she told him, she’s off the list of suspects!

*

I have only one New Year’s resolution, and it too leverages other people’s desire to be liked/remain within the bounds of society’s norms: It is to give the bird to any truck that honks at me while I’m running. There have been three different trunks beep at me on the road while I’m out in my tights in the past month, and at first I thought it was my friends. I texted them, Was that you?! But it wasn’t. The other day, an F150 gave me a good loud honk while I was on a downhill, and my finger came up all by itself. Fuck you! And HNY.

ETA: I think the time Noodles called the police for the walker was actually after a man with a knife ran at her on the trail. The murder was a different time! Come on and move to Troy.

luck

Japhy: heads or tails? I'm heads.

Me: tails

Japhy: (flicks coin into oblivion)

goodies

Colm Tóibín on the fires:

I had been fast asleep just a second before. Now it was all go. I ran around the house. If only I had pumped up the wheels of the bicycles – if only – we could go zooming down the hill like heroes!

this Christmas tree lot diary:

Having some jokes can help. Brian jostles the tree after it’s tied onto the roof and says, “Just keep it under ninety.” I like to tie a tree to the top of a car and say, “This is my twenty-mile-per-hour knot,” or “This is my forty-mile-per-hour knot.” Sometimes I take a little piece of twine, hand it to a child inside, and close the other end in the car door. I say, “This is holding the tree to the roof of the car. DO NOT let go.”

on the original botched face; crowd-pleasing gone wrong:

These women wanted wider eyes or higher cheekbones or perfectly pursed lips or plump under eyes or unlined necks or triangular chins, or they wanted it all, and what they got was disfigurement to a degree that keeps them home all day in the dark, typing in the blue light of laptop screens.

This Baffler piece on Tokyo, in its specificity, felt like it applies to other expensive big cities I know:

The prospect of being expelled from the city is terrifying. The residents who grouse to newspapermen about the sound of plastic wheels on the sidewalk hate the city, but they are more afraid of their shallow roots being dug up, of towers and chain coffee shops burying all traces of their existence. In a nation that gathers around Tokyo like the last torch in the encroaching dark, being asked to quit the city for a wretched exurban stretch of pachinko parlors and family restaurants amounts to exile, even if we’re talking about the native soil of one’s own parents or grandparents.

I’m still recovering from the open mic scene of the mid-2010s (we used to joke that we needed invisible raincoats for all the invisible jizz being tossed by comics), and thought Seth Simons was good on Whitney Cummings:

I’m typically not one to say “it’s not even funny” about material like this, but in this case I really am struck by the gulf between the quality of Cummings’ jokes and her own perception of them: not only that they were funny enough to say on national television, but that they were so dangerous she might get persecuted for it. This stuff really does rot the brain.

this one

today’s banner comes from a “space golf” place in the mall that charges $20/p for 18 crummy holes, did you guess? Anyway, thank you for reading <3

mentally, I am here