Analog Your Algorithm
In Thanksgiving for Strangers
I scrolled to the bottom of hopelessness the other day.
The algorithm has figured out that I’m a hypothetical baker. If you’re gonna meticulously frost a cupcake to look like a miniature lattice pie (!), I am going to watch. If you’re going to show me a time lapse of a variety of goods baking in an oven, I’m also going to watch. Probably a few times in a row because, wow, the way a muffin does rise and appear to breathe as it leaves its doughy self behind.
This is the exact kind of gentle content I need to cut the acidity of my feed these days. So the other day, when instagram served me a post about a way to pre-cut butter into even portions to make baking easier, I was drawn in. Oh look at that — such perfect little squares ready for happy combining. I read a few of the comments in case someone might be sharing a recipe I might need someday when I really start baking for once and for all and for real.
THIS IS THE DUMMEST [sic] THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. WHO NEEDS THIS??????
IF YOU WERE A BAKER, YOU’D UNDERSTAND!!!!!!!!!
It’s clear some of you HAVE NEVER BAKED A DAY IN YOUR LIFE!!!!!!!!!
Again, the topic here is butter.
I mean is the world really filled with strangers who are this angry about butter prep? Or are these subversive bots working for —I don’t know — store bought cookies? Or the Margarine Federation?
Media, social and otherwise, presents us all with so many angry voices, so many people primed to fight about anything, not just the high stakes things, the life and death things that are worthy of emotion and angst, but anything.
Meanwhile truth, never obliged to stick to possibilities, is no longer just stranger, but flat out worse than fiction.
The most outlandish make believe could not rival the world’s present narrative arc. Impossible things keep happening. And while we deal with all the stresses and fears and heartaches of our own small worlds, we consume a steady stream raging river of the larger world’s devastations, forced to contain multitudes at a rate and of a magnitude Walt Whitman couldn’t have ventured a transcendental guess at.
As I double take headline after headline, I keep wondering: what if we are not large enough? At some point all containers run out of space. You cannot put a gallon of soup in a pint. It spills over. You waste it. You burn your hand.
And yet, as terrible as this soup is, we can’t stop serving ourselves. We can’t ignore what’s happening. We can’t look away. And we shouldn’t. So we end up short-circuiting, operating well over our tragedy capacity.
And then, oh: it’s the holidays. There is no good way to reconcile Turkey Trots and bountiful tables and college kids coming home and football games and Black Friday with the devastating fact that everyday is black for so many people in the world right now.
This is another impossible thing.
But I do know I lose extra faith when I start mistaking the voices of the news and social media and wretched politicians as representative of the people in my daily life.
I don’t think the strangers I encounter most days are the strangers from the comment sections. I don’t think if I stopped and asked the person in line in front of me at the grocery store about butter prep, they would GO OFF about it.
I think most strangers wake up and with goodwill, or at least neutral-will, try for a bunch of other strangers every day. To live is to depend on the efforts and intentions of a lot of people we’ll never even meet. We rely on each other for all kinds of goods and services and ideas daily; and perhaps most critically, we entrust each other to not raise assholes.
As our world is ever harder to process, I’m trying to remind myself of this. I’m trying to scroll through my real life at least as often as I scroll on my phone, to analog my algorithm. Because we all create our own real world algorithm. We can look for bad and find it. And then keep finding it. Or we can look for good and find it.
And at least try to keep finding it.
So, in the spirit of the season, in response to the world and its digital algorithms, I give you four little stories of good, in thanksgiving for strangers.
ONE.
I was getting tea at a coffee shop after dropping off my high schooler in the city. I was waiting in line kinda impatiently, mentally ticking through all the weekday nonsense ahead of me. There was a man holding court near the pick up counter, wearing a veterans hat embroidered with a specific division and dates and a flag. He was in a wheelchair. He had informational sheets in a worn gallon bag that he was taking out and reviewing with other patrons. People waiting for lattes and flat whites keyed in and listened as long as frothing allowed.
He wrapped up his presentation at the same time my drink was ready. We both headed for the exit at the same time. I stepped in front of him to open and hold the door for him.
He started through the doorway and then in the middle of it, he STOPPED. He closed his eyes, cocked his head to the side, and pretended to fall asleep. Exaggerated fake snoring. Honk-shoooooo.
“Oh wait. You’re asleep now? What’s going on?” I acted shocked, exaggerating too because I love a bit almost as much as I love baking content.
He cocked his head to the side and opened one eye.
'“HAHA! Gotcha!”
And he really did. He got me. Not because I thought he was asleep, but because he woke me up.
TWO.
I was flying to the east coast a few weeks ago, seated in an aisle seat.
The woman in the window was placing calls before taking off, but not the work calls you usually overhear before a flight takes off from SFO about circling back and putting pins in things. The ones that make you wish you could underhear them.
I was overhearing her place human calls to people she loved, in quick succession.
The rapidity had a little bit of in-case-we-crash energy, like she was going on the record one more time with the people she loved. I don’t typically like this vibe as I’m getting settled on a plane. I like when people act casual about strapping themselves into half a million pounds of metal and launching into the sky for hours on end. I like when people act like it is all very normal. Boring even. Ho hum. Nothing risky to see here. Not for anything, but I also like when people clean their tray and armrests and mise en place their water, food, book, ipad just so, doing everything just short of chopping a fresh cord of firewood for some imagined fireplace, as if they’re homesteading. It makes me feel cozy.
On her third call, the Window Woman caught someone who couldn’t talk, “No, no. It wasn’t important. I just had some funny stories to tell you. But we can talk later. I love you.”
And that is it right there: I just had some funny stories to tell you. Like in the span of just a few sentences, she’d found a way to say I love you twice.
The plane door was about to close and the middle seat between us was still open. We looked at each other like could we be so lucky. I think the last time I had an open seat beside me on a flight I was traveling in acid wash jeans.
The door was jussssssstttttt about to shut when a fairly large man with a fairly large service dog stepped on board. He, of course, headed for our row, cramming into our middle seat, and stowing his dog across his feet and mine.
This felt a poor set up for a five hour flight, and I could feel the wires of my grumpy circuitry about to trip. But then, right before my view of her was obstructed for the rest of the flight, I caught eyes with the Window Woman and we both started to laugh.
And I realized this probably wasn’t really a problem.
It was probably a funny story.
THREE.
Our local pizza shop started curbside pick up during the pandemic and I consider this one of the brightest things to come out of those dark years. My youngest eats a lot of pizza. If you want to picture his food pyramid, just imagine a piece of pepperoni pizza turned crust down, and that’s pretty much it, with maybe red delicious apples and glasses of milk at the points.
A few days ago we were picking up our weekly pizza.
“Oh look,” I said to my son as the man approached our car with our pizza, “It’s the same guy as last time. Remember him? His name is G—.”
“Oh yeah! Hi, G—! Remember me?? I’m L—!” my son yelled with long-lost-relative energy.
“Hey, L—! How are you today?” G— said with the same energy, also happy to be at a family reunion with a kid he’d just met.
“Your name is G—! I have a lovey with the same name!” My son pronounced this as if there couldn’t be a happier or more thoroughly unlikely declaration.
“My niece watches that show!” G told him and my son beamed.
“But G—, I didn’t catch your middle name,” My son likes a full introduction. He is particular about a person’s particulars. Now, I don’t believe in reincarnation generally speaking, but can I believe in a corner case or two? Sure I can. Which is why I sometimes think my youngest is my paternal grandfather back for another go round of extreme friendliness, probably because he didn’t meet enough people the first time through.
“Mine is Mahhrrhh-ffee,” pronouncing Murphy like the son of first gen Irish immigrants growing up in Jamaica Plain, MA. And though he’s long on exposure to a British accent thanks to Peppa Pig and Thomas the Train, my son has never heard a brogue firsthand. It makes you think, right?
“I like that name!” There were undoubtedly customers inside the restaurant getting antsy about their pies, but G— knew that strangers could wait. “Listen, have a great night, okay? Enjoy that pepperoni pizza. And just remember — you always have a friend here at [Blankety Blank] Pizza.”
G— said this so genuinely. I imagined my son facing a tough situation some day down the line and catching him as he headed out the door, “Mom, I’m going to [Blankety Blank] Pizza. I gotta go talk this out with G—.”
As we pulled away from the curb to head home, a whole new boxed circle of sustenance warming his lap, my son looked back at G— disappearing back into the pizza shop.
“G— is so nice. He is my friend.”
FOUR.
Another time within the last few weeks, I was flying with my youngest. Just the two of us, at the start of a full day of connections headed back across the country to CA.
We were only 20 minutes into our journey together and thoughts of the long day ahead were already making me quite…short. What if he has a seizure on the plane? What if his shows didn’t download on the ipad? Obviously, these are not equal concerns; less obviously, there’s probably less space between them than you would guess.
“Why don’t you sit down?” He was eating an apple, wanting me to look at how he could spin, flying all around as if he’d been cleared for a wild landing by his own personal air traffic control.
“Okay, okay. Great spinning. Now please sit down.” I said, knowing it was early to be fed up, but feeling undeniably stuffed.
My son heard what I said, and the way I said it, and he sat — and though the closest bench was wide open, he sat VERRRRYYYY close to the only other woman on the bench, lowering himself practically on to her lap.
“Ok, you need to move over a little,” I said to him with my same wow-it’s-gonna-be-a-long-day energy. “Sorry…” I said to her.
“Oh, he’s fine,” she said to me. “Wow that apple looks good. Do you like apples?” she said to him.
“Mmhmm. It is very g-oooooo-d,” Obviously, this word has those two O’s in a row so you need to long O it. This is one of the earliest letter rules you learn, and even after you learn that English has ten exceptions for every one rule, it’s still a much more fun way to say good.
“You are really making it look g-oooooo-d,” she was no dummy. She knew about the two O’s too.
My son likes to lean on people near him, always seeking the feedback of another person. This works well when he’s beside family, and then follows a kind of sliding scale the less well he knows someone. Now he was slumped on this G-oooooo-d Woman we’d only just met.
She didn’t scoot away. She sat there extra fortified to receive his weight. She told him that she’d been on vacation in Vermont visiting friends, and now she needed to get back to her job as a special education aide.
I’ve learned not to ask “what are the chances?” when my son has these kinds of interactions. I’ve come to believe that, as often as not, he finds them. As if he’s guided by his own kind of homing device, some kind of compassion-seeking infrared.
What’s more, my son’s analog algorithm can’t nail him down. There’s a layer of unpredictability built in.
His real world For You page (you know: his life) is a rotating demonstration of what the world serves you when it isn’t expecting you.
You’d think the results would be chaos. But here’s the other thing I’ve learned watching my son navigate the world: strangers are more ready for the unexpected than you’d think. They will surprise you, more often than not, in good, not-angry-about-butter ways.
Because when you walk around with this reverse kind of sixth sense, you don’t see dead people.
You see the ones who are most alive.
To a holiday season of analog algorithms,
Jen.
DISCLAIMER: I know this sounds pretty rosy, and I feel it’s important to point out that I am not even an exceptionally positive person. In the last month alone, I’ve written letters of suggestion to Hertz, United and AC Marriott resulting in resolutions of varying satisfaction (respectively: none, some, complete). People keep asking me how I feel on tamoxifen and I believe this customer feedback capsule collection I’ve penned to be a good proxy for my answer. Kinda grouchy, if we’re being honest. A little prickly, as can be expected when a drug rearranges your hormones. And though mood shifts are a known tamoxifen side effect, along with increased risk of endometrial cancer and uterine sarcomas (waaaiiiiitttt a minute…), I don’t see increased risk of customer service complaints listed anywhere on the bottle. But no matter — I’m practically a doctor and mostly a pharmacist and I’ve run multiple drug trials: I know full well that just because a side effect isn’t listed doesn’t mean you’re not having it.
Thank you for a delightful read. Going forward I will never be angry about the butter.
Loved every word. Really gooood.