The Madeline Era

"We Love Our Bread, We Love Our Butter, but Most of All, We Love Each Other."

“THIS IS SO MADELINE,” I said to myself, over and over again. I’ve spent the last few weeks attempting to write about being in my “Madeline Era,” studying in a situation similar to a boarding school, away from my family for extended periods of time. The problem I ran into was that the similarities between Madeline and myself inevitably dissolved after enough thought. Let me just say, I am very tired of thinking about Madeline. She has cursed me with her wholesome spunk and her unbreakable spirit. Ultimately, it was disappointing to realize that I’m not a beloved children’s book character. I’m not in a “Madeline Era.” I’m just in college.

Reapproaching Madeline, as both a book series and a tv anthology, was indulgently nostalgic. I wish I had appreciated its purity 12 years ago the way I do now. It’s rare to see a series that radiates such irrefutable positivity. If I had tried to write Madeline, it would have turned into a Mean Girls spin-off. I’m hopeful that more content takes a more Madeline approach overall. It’s hard to ascribe a theme, or analysis, to the entire universe that is Madeline’s, and I’m not going to try. The best I can think of would be positivity, or maybe love.

The part of Madeline that you might remember is the iconic appendicitis episode. That, and the yellow raincoats. Maybe some of the songs, too. When Madeline gets appendicitis, she’s taken to the hospital and has her appendix removed. During this time, the rest of the girls at the boarding school are in complete disarray. All they want is for her to come back and for her to be okay. When they are allowed to visit Madeline, they spend an entire day searching for the perfect gifts to help her feel better. They treat her so well that they convince themselves they should fake appendicitis to end up in the cushy hospital with Madeline.

I saw a parallel between Madeline and myself when I got the flu this past semester. I unapologetically turn into a wounded, whining mess when I get sick. My parents usually picked up the slack, and now it would be my friends. Everybody enters college with varying levels of independence, but it’s all equalized by how you respond to challenge. As much as I like being independent, I have learned to love the makeshift “family” that college creates. The flu completely incapacitated me, and my friends responded by sending me gifts of care and well wishes. From friends, it could be considered the bare minimum. It depends on how high your friendship standards are, I guess. I found it incredibly touching.

Bare minimum or flatteringly generous, it all derives from the same central feeling that compelled Madeline’s friends to visit her in the hospital. For a split second, regardless of the world’s external stresses, there existed a chasm where I could be Madeline, and my friends her friends. The life transition of becoming a college student is supposed to represent the beginning of independent adult life. What I’ve realized, though, is that my college situation lends itself to a wholesome amount of care and love comparable to the love I received back home, growing up. My friends and I are forced to look out for each other because we realize, at a physical level, no one else is doing so. In this way, we can touch on an inner purity similar to one that many of us yearn to have back.

Madeline, Madeline, Madeline.

Much of my creative time has been spent discussing the transition from childhood to adulthood. One of my screenplays, Anywhere But Here, features the regret of chasing adulthood as a central theme. Despite this, it has taken me until now to realize that growing up can mean more than simply becoming an adult. College life has allowed me an opportunity to grow up again, just in a different way. I may be an adult, but it feels like now is when we are finally learning how to live. It’s an amorphous yet invaluable education. It’s unlikely that we will see life with the same wonder that Madeline does, ever again. However, there are tiny moments that allow me to recognize that the end of childhood does not mean the end of purity, or wholesomeness. I’m grateful for that, and I’m grateful for the friends that make that statement true. We are all adults who are learning how to be adults, and in that shared struggle, there is a relatability similar to those children who yearned to be where we are now.

If you think about growing up in the right way, you never stop growing up. There is always more to learn, and there is always more beauty to be found. A close friend of mine called me recently. I’ve known him since preschool. He asked me, “Is it too late to be kind?” I was shocked by this question because it was unorthodox compared to our usual conversations. I responded by telling him, no, it wasn’t too late to be kind. It’s never too late to be a kind person.

There is always more.

When I was in second grade, my favorite part of class was when we would go to the computer lab. I loved playing games on the old Macs they kept there. Mr. Nick oversaw the school computer lab, and I consider him one of the first adult mentors I ever had. He recognized my computer proficiency and rewarded me with new challenges and opportunities. I looked up to him quite a lot. When I left elementary school, he handed me a letter. He wrote to me,

“When I grow up, I want to be like you.”

The feeling of being in fifth grade and having your teacher say they wanted to be like you is kind of indescribable. I remember feeling happy and loved, but I was also baffled. Why on earth did he want to be like me? It should have been the opposite. To this day, I don’t know exactly what he saw in me that compelled him to write that. I am beginning to realize that Mr. Nick, despite being an adult with a full-time job, still recognized that there was room for him to grow up. Through this lens, what he said makes a little more sense. When I grow up, I think I want to be like Madeline.

There is always more.

I have now challenged myself with the notion that none of us ever finish growing up, and in that continued state of growth, there is an opportunity to recover the wholesome nature that many of us lose over time. It means that I will never be done interpreting the meaning of “growing up,” and I’m learning to recognize that it’s a privilege, not a curse. Being a grown-up does not signify the end of growth. I am incredibly blessed to live in a situation where life always provides me with more room to grow.

To feel and learn how to feel. To love and learn how to love.

Meat Computer, Meet Computer

An interaction I hope I'm not around for...

@ 1:12

I know you now

I’ve felt you out

That night we shared that glass of wine

We spilled ourselves on the floor for both to see

Now nothing can change that day for you and me

Cause I’ve offered you my heart out showed you what I’m made of

I sat at the piano and my fingers went to work

I’ve never felt so hurt

My voice was so unheard that night we shared that glass of wine

meat computer.

I think if I had written this a few weeks ago, I would’ve only included the line “meat computer.” The song above, Stray, is by popular hyperpop artist meat computer. They use a producer tag before some of their beat drops, where a heavily autotuned voice utters their name. I don’t know why hearing that voice say “meat computer” has always been so satisfying to me, but it’s honestly why I listen to their music.

I’m a neuroscience student. If you haven’t made the connection already, then here it is. I’m studying meat computers for the next four years. Unfortunately, “meat computer” will most likely be a synonym for “brain” for the rest of my time on the planet. A week ago, I sat through a lecture on the body’s nervous system, and my professor (also the head of the neuroscience department) asked everyone to draw a neuron in our notes. She then walked around the class, inspecting everyone’s drawings. I had drawn a very pretty neuron, but I had also previously written “MEAT COMPUTER” at the top of my page in fat block letters. My professor inspected my page, seemingly without much concern since my neuron looked satisfactory. There was, however, a slight hesitation in her gaze. A pause in her flow that forced out a barely audible “hm” from her pursed lips.

I knew that she had registered the words “meat computer.”

I can’t explain why, but the phrase has a way of sticking in your head. I hope it’s stuck in my professor’s head, a memory that appears randomly in her head. Like, “Meat computer, that’s what Tom (I don’t know why she calls me this nobody ever calls me that) wrote in his notes. Ignoring its gross connotations, it’s a genius name for a band. Iconic, in a way. By now, I’ve written “meat computer” in this post more than you or I would like, so I’ll stop (for now).

I’ve never been one to pay much attention to lyrics; I usually focus more on the instruments and rhythm. For me, lyrics usually turn into sounds, making up the melody. Despite this, after repeatedly listening to a song, the lyrics themselves get harder to tune out. After listening to Stray countless times, the lyrics I included at the beginning of this post popped out at me. Compared to other songs of the hyperpop genre, I think these are above average. I’ll save you the bore of reading me psychoanalyze each and every line (I’m also just too lazy to do this), as I’m sure you could do so yourself, given the fact that the lyrics are basically just telling a story. Feel free to scroll back up and read them again.

What I love most about this story is that it completely omits how the narrator got hurt; it just provides the fact that they did as a given. The final line alludes to why things went wrong with this person, “My voice was so unheard that night we shared that glass of wine.” I love this because it contrasts what might’ve seemed like a mutual situation at the story's start, with both “spilling” themselves on the floor.

“Spill” involves a sort of involuntary connotation that I particularly relate to. I often find that once I tell someone one personal thing, everything else just sort of, spills out. In spilling myself out, I often find that I can “speed run” getting closer to that person. Oversharing deep and personal secrets about myself enables a chemistry that most relationships take weeks, if not months, to reach. I’d love to write more about this topic because of its pros and cons, but for now, I just want to focus on the fact that I do it at all. There’s nothing inherently wrong or right about it, and I don’t do it consciously, but it is something I like to keep track of.

I think it took me a while to realize that friendships, or romance, that start with the “spilling” of yourself are not absolved from the same problems that every relationship has the potential to run into. In fact, it's even worse because the stakes are higher, and the potential for people to get hurt increases with the amount that those people know about you. At the same time, the liability of getting hurt still exists when someone finds out something they didn’t know about you later in the relationship’s progress. In Stray’s story, though, the characters choose to spill themselves, resulting in the narrator being hurt, presumably because things did not work out between them and the person they spilled with. I want to focus on the logical disconnect in that they knew everything about each other, but the narrator still felt “unheard.”

I hope you enjoyed that break because I’m going to start using the phrase “meat computer” again. Due to my planned neuroscience degree, and my disdain for attending medical school, I will most likely end up doing some form of artificial intelligence or machine learning work. That or data science, which is a little bleak but would pay the bills anyhow. Career prospects aside, the difference between the human brain and an artificial brain is something that I enjoy thinking about. Computers are reaching a point where it seems like there aren’t many things they can’t do. While this thought freaks me out, at least one thing that people seem to agree is beyond the scope of computers, and that is emotion. I think a lot of this boils down to how emotions are inherently illogical, and how our “meat computers” react to those emotions in inexplicable ways.

Learning to appreciate this fact is something that I struggle with. My brain likes logic, despite my occasional failure to see logic, which separates my brain from being a computer itself. What I noticed in the lyrics of Stray is that despite one person knowing seemingly everything about you, a part of you still goes unheard. There is still a voice that is not given a platform, even if you say everything you possibly can. The way that our personalities cannot be handed to someone in a text file is an equal parts frustrating and beautiful part of meat computers. There is something that cannot be explained about ourselves with words, or logic, which further solidifies the separation between us and computers. I find much comfort in this fact.

The problem I realize now boils down to an issue of pigeonholing. I think there is an emotional aspect of myself that wants to be understood and validated the first day I meet someone. However, due to the inability of our “meat computers” to be easily summed up, it’s impossible for this “spilling” of myself to effectively communicate my entire being, no matter how hard I might try. As a result, I end up convincing myself and others that the person I share upon the first spill is in fact my complete being, effectively boxing myself into that character. It leaves little room for growth and little room for error as well.

Sometimes I wish to simply hand my personality to someone in a packet of code because it would be so indulgently easy. I’m learning to appreciate, though, that the process of getting to know someone is equally as satisfying as the feeling of knowing, or being known. Maybe what I’m trying to say is that knowing someone “fully” is only rewarding when you’ve actually put in the work to do so. I think that if I were to meet someone whom I could genuinely grasp in only a few hours, I would become bored within a few weeks (at most).

I love pointing out little intricacies that separate us from computers because many of them are easy to forget. It’s even easier to forget that given the current impossibility of computers replicating ourselves, it is equally impossible for us to replicate computers. The simplicity and logic of a computer are undeniably attractive to the human mind, but if we were to remove our own complexity, I think I would miss it. A lot.

“You know that’s not what I meant. You know me; you know my being,” I said.

“Ha-ha. Yes. I do ‘know your being’,” they responded.

It was so satisfying. There is always more to know, but I can’t explain how satisfying that was to hear.

Thomas

Are You Good?

its to be or not to be all over again :/

A friend of mine recently explained their conceptual philosophy (she would rather not use the word “philosophy” but it really is the best way to label it) on life, which essentially boils down to being a good human being. It’s difficult to ascribe a meaning to being “good,” but according to my friend, it’s something we should all be.

Before delving into the depths of this topic, it is worth mentioning how the subject came up in the first place. We sat in our usual, arbitrarily chosen spot in the first-year dining hall, and I was in a poor mood. This was partly due to the caffeine crash that comes along after every manic midterm studying episode. The other part is a little harder to explain. I’m still in a bad mood as I write this now, and given the situation, I can’t say that I’m surprised. I think I usually do personal writing when I feel most alone, a result of some narcissistic tendencies tricking me into believing that talking to my own thoughts is a form of human connection. After all, writing is a form of conversation if you write with the person reading it in mind. At the very least, this person will be yourself, the writer.

If writing is a conversation between two subjects, and I represent both, then I suppose that becomes an especially dangerous conversation. Hell, there can be a million sides, and if no one is going to read the writing, then I represent every side. Sides aside, the point is that I’m writing this both for myself to read and for myself to write. Somewhere in between those, I am enabling myself to think. At the same time, I write for you, the reader, so that you know that when you read this, I am writing for both you and me. I alluded to the idea that no one will read this personal entry of thought, but I know that eventually, tomorrow or in ten years, this piece of writing will be read. That person, whether it’s me or not, will be a different person than the person writing this now. So, I am having this conversation with you in mind, which is something that I hope you, the second side of this conversation, decide to keep in mind.

People have told me before that I write depressingly. I don’t. I write when I feel depressed. I wouldn’t say that I write when I am depressed because, according to my diagnosis, I am always depressed. I can’t say I always feel it.

That being said, I apologize for the depressing tone. I would love to write here that “I can’t help it,” but I know that I can, and I just won’t.

I desperately hope that this “foreword” of sorts has done enough to establish my ethos. Have you noticed? Can you tell that I beg for you to permit me to speak my thoughts without consequence? I sincerely hope so.

I’m not going to get into what it means to be “good”. I’m almost too lazy to think about it, and I’m definitely too lazy to write it down. What I will get into is that by talking to my friend about the idea of being good, I lost sight of any idea I had about it previously. I didn’t know what “good” was or wasn’t before, and after thinking about it more, I’m only more lost. I’ll have to add it to the list of things that can’t exactly be explained. It will have some respectable companionship with love, resentment, joy, guilt, etc. My English professor expressed disdain for my habit of using “etc.,” but I think this is a valid use case. The list of things we can’t explain can really only be summed up by “etc.”

In my friend’s very clear and very valid criticism of capitalism, she explained that the religion of capitalism has resulted in humans primarily in their own self-interest, often at the expense of others. I agree. And this is by no means a teardown of my friend or my friend’s philosophy. It might be helpful, at this point, to explain that philosophy in some more detail.

I’m going to do my best here, as even she was very adamant that her thinking could not be put on a piece of paper. This can be said about a lot of things, though, even writing itself. Going back to the analogy of conversation, if writing is a conversation, then all subjects involved are speaking a different language. There is the language of the writer and the language of the readers. Things are bound to be lost in translation.

Here it is, anyway.

If everyone can tap into their intrinsic “good,” then we would eliminate the need for any self-interest and thus any evil. This obviously takes its roots in the idea of “natural good,” and I think assuming the truth in this idea saves us from that age-old debate. So, assuming humans are born with the quality of being “good,” and assuming that all evil is born through the concept of self-interest, then putting humans in a situation without self-interest will result in a world absent of evil and full of good. This utopic society would solve a plethora of problems, and the best way to sum those up would be to think of every problem that human greed has created in society. You run into a “chicken or egg” situation here; did greed create capitalism or did capitalism create greed? It’s hard to say, but for now, I’ll settle on the idea that capitalism enables greed.

My friend explained that if we were all good to each other, everyone would be comfortable, because anyone uncomfortable would be absolved of their discomfort by the nature of others’ generosities. I love this idea and wish I could stop writing here. I’m quite a bit tired, and it would be nice to fall asleep and wake up in a world of universal good. The impossibility of this pushed me into the predicament I lie in now.

To achieve universal good, a reset would need to take place. Not only would everyone need to believe that they have the potential to be good (you could write an essay on this problem alone), but they would need to start being good. According to my friend, the reason they would do this is a common belief that the goodness of all will result in the needs of all being met. If the needs of all people are met, then why wouldn’t someone choose to be good? It’s a beautiful cycle.

However, I ran into a roadblock thinking about this cycle. Maybe I’m consumed by capitalistic tendencies, and I am simply far too gone. What I realized, though, is that in order to make a conscious effort to be good, one has to consciously think about being good. This is a process that would eliminate our “natural good,” because it puts us in control of being good, or not being good. That is to say, by consciously trying to be good, I worry we might be losing touch with what being good actually is.

If we are to undertake ourselves with being good, and the reasoning behind doing so is so that the goodness of others will come back and repay us, then the idea of goodness becomes ironically transactional. My friend then explained that she is repaid simply by the good feeling that being good gives her. Still, this is a transactional situation. By trying to be good, you end up trying to be good for a reason, and that reason lies in self-interest.

It is now that my friend and I reached the alarming part of this conversation for me (as if the whole thing wasn’t already alarming enough), and that was when she explained that she is always thinking about how she can be a good person.

“If you are always trying to be a good person, then you will become a good person.”

“I don’t really ever think about being a good person. I just…be. I do good and sometimes I do bad. But it’s rarely ever with intent,” I responded.

“Oh. Well, it’s something that I always do.”

“What is?”

“Try to be good.”

So, she was always trying to be good, and I was not. I could not help but feel like I was not a good person because of this fact. I question now whether I am good or not, whether anyone can be good or not, and whether being good is a concept that we should strive for in the first place. If you are being good with transactional intent, is that good? Does goodness in self-interest count? Isn’t self-interest the thing we seek to destroy? At the same time, is it possible for me to be good if I am not actively trying, and thus feeding my own self-interest?

I am scared of trying to be good. I am equally scared of not trying. If I am not trying, then I worry that I will cease to be good. And if I am trying, then I worry that my goodness is invalidated by the effort of being good itself. The whole idea of being good quite literally makes me want to throw up having thought about it for so long. I deeply long for the answers to my questions, and I hope that the other end of this conversation holds its answers.

As I sat on my bed and tore out my hair, wrapping my head around this subject (mind you, this was not a philosophy assignment), my roommate Gabriel (bless his heart) took note of my obvious disarray.

“You good?” he said.

“Yea,” I responded. “I hope so.”

Best wishes in your quest (or lack thereof) for good,

Thomas