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My Quaint Little Story:
I’m leaning against the back of my chair, drumming my fingers as fast as I can against the surface of the table. I wait for a second, stare at the parade of brown bags in front of me, then slowly extend a hand for a blue marker.
“So, uh…” I gulp a bit. “I guess I’ll start prettying these up?”
The girl across from me, Annie, laughs. “Oh my god, Jenny, you’ve been staring at the bags for, like, an hour.” She flips her long brown hair out of her face. “We’re almost finished with labeling these.”
My friend, Janet, quickly jumps onto a seat next to me. “We’ll help finish them off!”
She grabs a paper bag and a green marker. Then, looking at the back of another paper bag with writing on it, Janet quickly copies it down on her bag.
Boston Korea Seventh Day Adventist Church: Written in a spiky green script, the sign proudly displays its origins. My eyes scan the rest of the bags, wondering if I could somehow wriggle my way out of this menial task.
Marker. Paper. Me. Oh, my god. Dolphins. I can draw dolphins onto the paper bags! Teehee, ain’t I so smart?
My thought process, after a bout of arguing with itself whether or not I’m skilled enough to draw invertebrate mammals, finally comes to the conclusion of me making myself useful by doodling random images onto the back of the paper bags. Namely bunnies ‘cuz everyone likes bunnies.
It’s a crisp Saturday afternoon, one in which I’m spending at church. Because, you know, it’s, like, my religion. I’m supposed to go to church on every Saturday.
Recently, my youth group decided to take on some community service projects. It’s been a huge improvement over waiting around on overstuffed couches for our parents to come out of their meetings. Right now, we’re all involved in Operation: Distributing Provisions to Unfortunate Suburban Mendicants- meaning that we’re going to drive to Boston and hand out bagged lunches to the homeless.
While the other half of the youth group are making mutated burritos out of meatless turkey, lettuce, pita bread, and salsa, Annie, Janet, and I are all just messing around and drawing random faces onto the paper bags. Later, we also fill them up with juice boxes and Korean snacks.
The rest of the youth group finally wrap up the burritos in foil. The finished product reminds me of a molten lump of silver. There’s also some burritos that are flat and rectangular, while there’s one that’s shaped…like a heart.
I guess that’s a way of saying that we have a lot of love.
“Whoa, they look radioactive,” I call out to the youth group leader, Juhyun.
Juhyun tilts her head sideways and gives me an overly exaggerated smile. She replies “Oh, really? It’s such a pity that you couldn’t help us- maybe you could‘ve done better.”
“Hey, I was too busy decorating these ugly bags!” I smile and shrug.
We load up the lunch bags into three boxes and carry them to two vans. Before climbing into one of the vans, I quickly write down Juhyun’s phone number on my hand. That way, even if I get lost, I can still ask some random guy, borrow his cell, and call her.
Somehow, perhaps by the miracle of God, I manage to squeeze into a van along with eight other people. I’m cooped up in the back with the two youngest members, Yubin and Youjung, and with Janet. In the front two seats are Annie and Peyton. In the very front is Esther, and her mom.
It takes at least an hour’s drive of chatting about cheesecakes and playing Temple Run (it’s a pity that I only reached twenty-three thousand points. Stupid bridge gaps.) before we finally reach a quaint, busy-looking crossroad with multitudes of people talking on their phones or excitedly conversing with each other. The earthy beat of a drum percolates through the air and lends this rambling chaos a sort of rhythm, a sort of intensity that sharpens the experience.
We finally reached Harvard’s Square.
I rush out of the van and step onto good, solid land. I dance around a bit, before Annie ushers us to a bookstore called the Coop. One more van drives by and drops off the rest of our little association. We all huddle together and count off by threes to form groups.
I stamp my feet and groan when I realize that I have no Janet to torture. Instead, I’m stuck with Joseph, Juhyun, Esther, and Yubin. Joseph, due to him being the token male, is forced to carry the box of bags, and the group troops down our designated street.
I don’t really pay attention to where I’m going, as seeing I’m too busy writing down everything in a small notebook. I plan on writing the whole experience down to, I don’t know, create some kind of thought-provoking magnum opus that wryly comments about the conditions of the poor. Maybe I might actually get a character-developing lesson out of this, or get some great epiphany about life.
Juhyun, meanwhile, is charged with the task to make sure that I don’t walk straight into a rushing car or anything.
Within minutes of scouring the streets, we see an old man slumped against the brick wall of a candle store. In his gnarly, liver-spotted hands, he holds a cardboard sign. The cotton gray hat on his balding head droops over his eyes, while his pale blue eyes stare down at the hems of his black flannel jacket.
“Um, excuse me!” Esther quickly grabs a paper bag- I look up for a second to notice that it’s the one that I drew a drunken bunny on- and rushes to the old man. “Would you like a lunch? It’s not much, but…”
The man stares up at her and blinks. Then he blinks more and more rapidly, until his lids resemble the wings of a hummingbird.
“You think he’s crying?” I nudge Joseph and mumble into his ear.
“Kinda.”
A few more seconds tick by, until the man finally accepts the bag with a shaking hand. He nods to us and thanks us in a throaty croak. We smile and nod back at him before we move on.
We take a few more steps, until Joseph points out a black man with a scruffy, brown hat. He’s sitting on a black crate, resting his head on his hands. Occasionally, he looks up and asks people for money. The people shake their heads at him and quicken their pace.
Quickly, like we’re trying to catch a Pokemon or something, we rush to the dude and offer him a paper bag. That one, I notice, is graced with the image of a voluptuous woman. The back of my neck suddenly starts burning when Juhyun and Esther look at me with raised brows.
“Thank you, thank you,” The man hugs the bag close to his chest.
“Oh, uh, you can take as many as you want!” Esther blurts out.
The man stares at her, before he shakes his head. “Good golly, no! It’s okay, but there’s other hungry people out there. Feed them first before giving me seconds.”
My ears perk up when they hear that phrase. I tear out my notebook and scribble down the saying into my notes.
“You know,” Juhyun says as we’re trudging through the streets, “I don’t think that we’re going to hand a lot of bags out. Let’s go someplace else.” And we head back to the Coop.
Right outside of the Coop is a man with dark skin and a pearly grin. His dreadlocks are tied back with a black cap, and he’s warmly clothed with a black hoodie. In his huge hands are a pair of sticks. He beats them against a bunch of buckets and weave together a raucous melody of beats and bams and thumps. Next to him is an old, worn-out leather boot. People crowd around him, whip out their I-Phones and snap pictures of him. Some of them just stand there, tapping their feet and bobbing their heads.
“Hey! Check out that drummer guy!” I look behind me and see Janet’s smiling face. Behind her are Annie and Sabrina. “Isn’t that so cool?” She asks me, mimicking the drummer.
I just shrug, ask her to hold my notebook and pencil, and rub my hands together. I snort when I see that they only have two bags left.
“We met a whole crowd of them at a plaza,” Annie gushes, waving her hands around. “They kept on telling us how sweet we were!”
A few more minutes pass by as we wait for the third group. I stay back under the arches of the shop, while the others go out to stare at the drummer. I, too, take a step out when I hear the last twang of a stick hitting a bucket.
A stocky, hooded man, one who’s sitting right in front of the drummer, starts whooping and patting his back. The drummer chuckles. He looks up and sees a small, pudgy boy with his chubby little fingers stuck in his ears.
The man stands up, stretches out his legs, and holds the little boy tight to him. Then he crouches down and whispers something to him. The little boy’s eyes widen and his head starts bobbing up and down.
Soon, the third group arrives. Eunjin, the second youth group leader, ushers everyone inside to the warmth of the bookstore. I stay outside to jot down some notes about the weather.
-weather is kind of cold, too much wind, sky is a smoky pale bl
That’s as much as I get before Juhyun tugs me into the store.
As soon as my feet cross over the threshold, it’s as if there’s a clock of warmth pressing down on me. I take in the spiral staircases, the large circle tables with piles of books stacked on them, and the book-laden shelves tacked onto the circular walls. I walk over to a table and flip open a book titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The words are a sudden blur in my mind when someone taps me on the shoulder. My heart starts racing when I’m confronted with a complete stranger. I scan the Coop for any signs of Esther, Juhyun, Eunjin- but they’re all gone!
Aw, dang- now I’m really going to have to borrow someone’s cell and call Juhyun’s number.
He towers over me, completely blocking my view of everything. He says something to me in a low, almost guttural voice. It’s layered heavily with some kind of accent.
I ask him one, twice- at least four times for him to repeat what he’s saying. I try to tell him that I’m just a passerby, but he keeps on shaking his head and repeating whatever the heck he’s said before. I just keep on spouting a mix of random words in a futile attempt into making him think that I’m too stupid to ask for answers. He, however, repeatedly asks me the same question in that cursedly thick accent of his.
My memory of my dialogue’s a bit blurred now, but I’m pretty sure that I was about to tell him a list of my top favorite animes to make fun of when a sharp, high-pitched voice cuts through the din of the store.
“Jenny! What are you doing?”
I spot Eunjin’s pale, round face and I’m filled with relief. I bound over to her, hoping that she can answer the stranger’s question for me. She, too, is floored so she just shoves him towards the customer service. The man refuses to go away, and he repeats the same question-
And oh, my god. “Do you know when the open-mic event is? I wrote a poem and I want to read it out loud here.”
I finally understand what he’s saying.
“Sir,” I say, “It’s on the twelfth of April.” I cross my fingers and pray that it isn’t too far off from the actual date. “But you might want to recheck with customs.” And with that, Eunjin grabs my hand and rushes me outside.
“If he’s that eager, he’ll eventually find a way to do it.” Eunjin huffs a bit and shakes her head. Then she turns to me. “Thank god we found you. Keep up, ‘kay?”
As soon as I’m reunited with the group, we stroll past stalls of men selling friendship bracelets, freshly painted snapshots of the landscape, sticks of candy, of candles- I think I even saw a guy trying to sell a jar of powdered teeth.
Along the way, amidst Annie and Esther’s intriguing study into the theory of whether or not having a boyfriend in the winter season is beneficial, the discussion suddenly warps into whether or not someone’s homeless.
“Oh, my god, Janet!” Annie suddenly bursts out. “I remember how when we were in the train station, Janet took a bag and tried to give it to someone- but it turned out that the person wasn’t homeless!”
We all roar out in laughter. We take a few more steps, when suddenly Janet stops us.
“Hey, she’s homeless! We should give her another bag!” She points to a red-haired woman slumped against the wall. Laying on her side is a piece of soggy cardboard with blurred words on it.
When the woman notices us looking at her, she smiles a bit and holds up her sign with shaky hands.
“No, Janet, we already gave her one.” Esther says. “We have to spread them out equally.”
“But-!” The word’s barely out of Janet’s mouth before Esther quickly interjects.
“We’ll find more people in the Boston commons. We might even find a whole family to feed.”
A whole family? Will we really find a whole, complete family- not just a nuclear one. I mean, like, including the grandparents and all- will we really find them all living outside on the streets? That can’t be possible…they can’t all be poor. A whole family being homeless is impossible! There has to be at least one relative whose life didn’t get screwed over.
Janet finally sighs and lets it go. The group walks back to the Coop, and Janet and I go up the elevator to take a restroom break. We pass by the Literary Criticism and Judaica, before I finally find the bathroom and park in front of it. I groan when I see a line of women trail from the door.
Slowly, eventually, one by one, the women clear out. The chick before me takes way too long. I time her on my I-Pod and see that she took twelve minutes and thirty two seconds. By the time Janet and I go back downstairs, I’m met with the most anticlimactic ending ever.
“What do you mean we have to go?” I practically screech at Juhyun and Eunjin. “We still have to give bags out to the homeless, don’t we?”
Juhyun looks at me with a mixture of amusement and pity. “Sorry, but you guys took too long in the privy. The others already went on without you. We might as well head back to church.”
Um, what? Just to clarify, I say my thoughts out loud. “Um, what?”
“C’mon, we’re going back to church.” Eunjin says.
From beside me, Janet pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you can interview the others when they come back. You don’t have to witness everything first-hand for yourself.”
Eunjin looks over at my notebook. “Oh, what’s that? Are you writing a story based off of this?”
I don’t really say anything. I’m just standing there, my eyes are protruding out, and my throat has a sudden lump stuck in it. My eyes prick a bit. Then I hurl my notebook at the ground and stomp on it.
“Jenny!” Eunjin shakes her head.
I explode. “Oh. My. God. What the ****? What kind of ending is that? How the **** am I supposed to get a ****ing meaningful experience if I’m just going home? You’ve got to be ****ing kidding me!”
It takes at least thirty minutes of Janet debasing herself as a slapstick comedian that I finally get rid of the urge to stab something with the pencil. On the ride to church, I mull over everything that I wrote down in my notebook.
Once you got down to it, there wasn’t anything really special about this whole event. Throughout the whole thing, I’ve been waiting for that warm fuzzy glow that you supposedly got from helping the needy- but really, I just didn’t care. I kept on waiting to feel my heart being touched, to feel that motivation of living a better, more purposeful life of not taking anything for granted. That’s a total fantasy, though.
I don’t think it’s because I haven’t seen true poverty. Maybe if I visit Cameroon or Haiti and see the scrawny kids with their bloated bellies, just maybe I’d feel something…but right now in America, nothing inspires any pathos for me.
Maybe someday, somewhere in the distant future, I might feel something. I really hope that I do. I don’t want to foist my apathy upon these undeserving people. Everyone deserves equal attention and intensity.
But in the meanwhile, my only feelings about this whole experience are meh. Mehmehmehmehmeh. No, really though.
Meh.
I’m leaning against the back of my chair, drumming my fingers as fast as I can against the surface of the table. I wait for a second, stare at the parade of brown bags in front of me, then slowly extend a hand for a blue marker.
“So, uh…” I gulp a bit. “I guess I’ll start prettying these up?”
The girl across from me, Annie, laughs. “Oh my god, Jenny, you’ve been staring at the bags for, like, an hour.” She flips her long brown hair out of her face. “We’re almost finished with labeling these.”
My friend, Janet, quickly jumps onto a seat next to me. “We’ll help finish them off!”
She grabs a paper bag and a green marker. Then, looking at the back of another paper bag with writing on it, Janet quickly copies it down on her bag.
Boston Korea Seventh Day Adventist Church: Written in a spiky green script, the sign proudly displays its origins. My eyes scan the rest of the bags, wondering if I could somehow wriggle my way out of this menial task.
Marker. Paper. Me. Oh, my god. Dolphins. I can draw dolphins onto the paper bags! Teehee, ain’t I so smart?
My thought process, after a bout of arguing with itself whether or not I’m skilled enough to draw invertebrate mammals, finally comes to the conclusion of me making myself useful by doodling random images onto the back of the paper bags. Namely bunnies ‘cuz everyone likes bunnies.
It’s a crisp Saturday afternoon, one in which I’m spending at church. Because, you know, it’s, like, my religion. I’m supposed to go to church on every Saturday.
Recently, my youth group decided to take on some community service projects. It’s been a huge improvement over waiting around on overstuffed couches for our parents to come out of their meetings. Right now, we’re all involved in Operation: Distributing Provisions to Unfortunate Suburban Mendicants- meaning that we’re going to drive to Boston and hand out bagged lunches to the homeless.
While the other half of the youth group are making mutated burritos out of meatless turkey, lettuce, pita bread, and salsa, Annie, Janet, and I are all just messing around and drawing random faces onto the paper bags. Later, we also fill them up with juice boxes and Korean snacks.
The rest of the youth group finally wrap up the burritos in foil. The finished product reminds me of a molten lump of silver. There’s also some burritos that are flat and rectangular, while there’s one that’s shaped…like a heart.
I guess that’s a way of saying that we have a lot of love.
“Whoa, they look radioactive,” I call out to the youth group leader, Juhyun.
Juhyun tilts her head sideways and gives me an overly exaggerated smile. She replies “Oh, really? It’s such a pity that you couldn’t help us- maybe you could‘ve done better.”
“Hey, I was too busy decorating these ugly bags!” I smile and shrug.
We load up the lunch bags into three boxes and carry them to two vans. Before climbing into one of the vans, I quickly write down Juhyun’s phone number on my hand. That way, even if I get lost, I can still ask some random guy, borrow his cell, and call her.
Somehow, perhaps by the miracle of God, I manage to squeeze into a van along with eight other people. I’m cooped up in the back with the two youngest members, Yubin and Youjung, and with Janet. In the front two seats are Annie and Peyton. In the very front is Esther, and her mom.
It takes at least an hour’s drive of chatting about cheesecakes and playing Temple Run (it’s a pity that I only reached twenty-three thousand points. Stupid bridge gaps.) before we finally reach a quaint, busy-looking crossroad with multitudes of people talking on their phones or excitedly conversing with each other. The earthy beat of a drum percolates through the air and lends this rambling chaos a sort of rhythm, a sort of intensity that sharpens the experience.
We finally reached Harvard’s Square.
I rush out of the van and step onto good, solid land. I dance around a bit, before Annie ushers us to a bookstore called the Coop. One more van drives by and drops off the rest of our little association. We all huddle together and count off by threes to form groups.
I stamp my feet and groan when I realize that I have no Janet to torture. Instead, I’m stuck with Joseph, Juhyun, Esther, and Yubin. Joseph, due to him being the token male, is forced to carry the box of bags, and the group troops down our designated street.
I don’t really pay attention to where I’m going, as seeing I’m too busy writing down everything in a small notebook. I plan on writing the whole experience down to, I don’t know, create some kind of thought-provoking magnum opus that wryly comments about the conditions of the poor. Maybe I might actually get a character-developing lesson out of this, or get some great epiphany about life.
Juhyun, meanwhile, is charged with the task to make sure that I don’t walk straight into a rushing car or anything.
Within minutes of scouring the streets, we see an old man slumped against the brick wall of a candle store. In his gnarly, liver-spotted hands, he holds a cardboard sign. The cotton gray hat on his balding head droops over his eyes, while his pale blue eyes stare down at the hems of his black flannel jacket.
“Um, excuse me!” Esther quickly grabs a paper bag- I look up for a second to notice that it’s the one that I drew a drunken bunny on- and rushes to the old man. “Would you like a lunch? It’s not much, but…”
The man stares up at her and blinks. Then he blinks more and more rapidly, until his lids resemble the wings of a hummingbird.
“You think he’s crying?” I nudge Joseph and mumble into his ear.
“Kinda.”
A few more seconds tick by, until the man finally accepts the bag with a shaking hand. He nods to us and thanks us in a throaty croak. We smile and nod back at him before we move on.
We take a few more steps, until Joseph points out a black man with a scruffy, brown hat. He’s sitting on a black crate, resting his head on his hands. Occasionally, he looks up and asks people for money. The people shake their heads at him and quicken their pace.
Quickly, like we’re trying to catch a Pokemon or something, we rush to the dude and offer him a paper bag. That one, I notice, is graced with the image of a voluptuous woman. The back of my neck suddenly starts burning when Juhyun and Esther look at me with raised brows.
“Thank you, thank you,” The man hugs the bag close to his chest.
“Oh, uh, you can take as many as you want!” Esther blurts out.
The man stares at her, before he shakes his head. “Good golly, no! It’s okay, but there’s other hungry people out there. Feed them first before giving me seconds.”
My ears perk up when they hear that phrase. I tear out my notebook and scribble down the saying into my notes.
“You know,” Juhyun says as we’re trudging through the streets, “I don’t think that we’re going to hand a lot of bags out. Let’s go someplace else.” And we head back to the Coop.
Right outside of the Coop is a man with dark skin and a pearly grin. His dreadlocks are tied back with a black cap, and he’s warmly clothed with a black hoodie. In his huge hands are a pair of sticks. He beats them against a bunch of buckets and weave together a raucous melody of beats and bams and thumps. Next to him is an old, worn-out leather boot. People crowd around him, whip out their I-Phones and snap pictures of him. Some of them just stand there, tapping their feet and bobbing their heads.
“Hey! Check out that drummer guy!” I look behind me and see Janet’s smiling face. Behind her are Annie and Sabrina. “Isn’t that so cool?” She asks me, mimicking the drummer.
I just shrug, ask her to hold my notebook and pencil, and rub my hands together. I snort when I see that they only have two bags left.
“We met a whole crowd of them at a plaza,” Annie gushes, waving her hands around. “They kept on telling us how sweet we were!”
A few more minutes pass by as we wait for the third group. I stay back under the arches of the shop, while the others go out to stare at the drummer. I, too, take a step out when I hear the last twang of a stick hitting a bucket.
A stocky, hooded man, one who’s sitting right in front of the drummer, starts whooping and patting his back. The drummer chuckles. He looks up and sees a small, pudgy boy with his chubby little fingers stuck in his ears.
The man stands up, stretches out his legs, and holds the little boy tight to him. Then he crouches down and whispers something to him. The little boy’s eyes widen and his head starts bobbing up and down.
Soon, the third group arrives. Eunjin, the second youth group leader, ushers everyone inside to the warmth of the bookstore. I stay outside to jot down some notes about the weather.
-weather is kind of cold, too much wind, sky is a smoky pale bl
That’s as much as I get before Juhyun tugs me into the store.
As soon as my feet cross over the threshold, it’s as if there’s a clock of warmth pressing down on me. I take in the spiral staircases, the large circle tables with piles of books stacked on them, and the book-laden shelves tacked onto the circular walls. I walk over to a table and flip open a book titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The words are a sudden blur in my mind when someone taps me on the shoulder. My heart starts racing when I’m confronted with a complete stranger. I scan the Coop for any signs of Esther, Juhyun, Eunjin- but they’re all gone!
Aw, dang- now I’m really going to have to borrow someone’s cell and call Juhyun’s number.
He towers over me, completely blocking my view of everything. He says something to me in a low, almost guttural voice. It’s layered heavily with some kind of accent.
I ask him one, twice- at least four times for him to repeat what he’s saying. I try to tell him that I’m just a passerby, but he keeps on shaking his head and repeating whatever the heck he’s said before. I just keep on spouting a mix of random words in a futile attempt into making him think that I’m too stupid to ask for answers. He, however, repeatedly asks me the same question in that cursedly thick accent of his.
My memory of my dialogue’s a bit blurred now, but I’m pretty sure that I was about to tell him a list of my top favorite animes to make fun of when a sharp, high-pitched voice cuts through the din of the store.
“Jenny! What are you doing?”
I spot Eunjin’s pale, round face and I’m filled with relief. I bound over to her, hoping that she can answer the stranger’s question for me. She, too, is floored so she just shoves him towards the customer service. The man refuses to go away, and he repeats the same question-
And oh, my god. “Do you know when the open-mic event is? I wrote a poem and I want to read it out loud here.”
I finally understand what he’s saying.
“Sir,” I say, “It’s on the twelfth of April.” I cross my fingers and pray that it isn’t too far off from the actual date. “But you might want to recheck with customs.” And with that, Eunjin grabs my hand and rushes me outside.
“If he’s that eager, he’ll eventually find a way to do it.” Eunjin huffs a bit and shakes her head. Then she turns to me. “Thank god we found you. Keep up, ‘kay?”
As soon as I’m reunited with the group, we stroll past stalls of men selling friendship bracelets, freshly painted snapshots of the landscape, sticks of candy, of candles- I think I even saw a guy trying to sell a jar of powdered teeth.
Along the way, amidst Annie and Esther’s intriguing study into the theory of whether or not having a boyfriend in the winter season is beneficial, the discussion suddenly warps into whether or not someone’s homeless.
“Oh, my god, Janet!” Annie suddenly bursts out. “I remember how when we were in the train station, Janet took a bag and tried to give it to someone- but it turned out that the person wasn’t homeless!”
We all roar out in laughter. We take a few more steps, when suddenly Janet stops us.
“Hey, she’s homeless! We should give her another bag!” She points to a red-haired woman slumped against the wall. Laying on her side is a piece of soggy cardboard with blurred words on it.
When the woman notices us looking at her, she smiles a bit and holds up her sign with shaky hands.
“No, Janet, we already gave her one.” Esther says. “We have to spread them out equally.”
“But-!” The word’s barely out of Janet’s mouth before Esther quickly interjects.
“We’ll find more people in the Boston commons. We might even find a whole family to feed.”
A whole family? Will we really find a whole, complete family- not just a nuclear one. I mean, like, including the grandparents and all- will we really find them all living outside on the streets? That can’t be possible…they can’t all be poor. A whole family being homeless is impossible! There has to be at least one relative whose life didn’t get screwed over.
Janet finally sighs and lets it go. The group walks back to the Coop, and Janet and I go up the elevator to take a restroom break. We pass by the Literary Criticism and Judaica, before I finally find the bathroom and park in front of it. I groan when I see a line of women trail from the door.
Slowly, eventually, one by one, the women clear out. The chick before me takes way too long. I time her on my I-Pod and see that she took twelve minutes and thirty two seconds. By the time Janet and I go back downstairs, I’m met with the most anticlimactic ending ever.
“What do you mean we have to go?” I practically screech at Juhyun and Eunjin. “We still have to give bags out to the homeless, don’t we?”
Juhyun looks at me with a mixture of amusement and pity. “Sorry, but you guys took too long in the privy. The others already went on without you. We might as well head back to church.”
Um, what? Just to clarify, I say my thoughts out loud. “Um, what?”
“C’mon, we’re going back to church.” Eunjin says.
From beside me, Janet pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you can interview the others when they come back. You don’t have to witness everything first-hand for yourself.”
Eunjin looks over at my notebook. “Oh, what’s that? Are you writing a story based off of this?”
I don’t really say anything. I’m just standing there, my eyes are protruding out, and my throat has a sudden lump stuck in it. My eyes prick a bit. Then I hurl my notebook at the ground and stomp on it.
“Jenny!” Eunjin shakes her head.
I explode. “Oh. My. God. What the ****? What kind of ending is that? How the **** am I supposed to get a ****ing meaningful experience if I’m just going home? You’ve got to be ****ing kidding me!”
It takes at least thirty minutes of Janet debasing herself as a slapstick comedian that I finally get rid of the urge to stab something with the pencil. On the ride to church, I mull over everything that I wrote down in my notebook.
Once you got down to it, there wasn’t anything really special about this whole event. Throughout the whole thing, I’ve been waiting for that warm fuzzy glow that you supposedly got from helping the needy- but really, I just didn’t care. I kept on waiting to feel my heart being touched, to feel that motivation of living a better, more purposeful life of not taking anything for granted. That’s a total fantasy, though.
I don’t think it’s because I haven’t seen true poverty. Maybe if I visit Cameroon or Haiti and see the scrawny kids with their bloated bellies, just maybe I’d feel something…but right now in America, nothing inspires any pathos for me.
Maybe someday, somewhere in the distant future, I might feel something. I really hope that I do. I don’t want to foist my apathy upon these undeserving people. Everyone deserves equal attention and intensity.
But in the meanwhile, my only feelings about this whole experience are meh. Mehmehmehmehmeh. No, really though.
Meh.
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My Quaint Little Story:
I’m leaning against the back of my chair, drumming my fingers as fast as I can against the surface of the table. I wait for a second, stare at the parade of brown bags in front of me, then slowly extend a hand for a blue marker.
“So, uh…” I gulp a bit. “I guess I’ll start prettying these up?”
The girl across from me, Annie, laughs. “Oh my god, Jenny, you’ve been staring at the bags for, like, an hour.” She flips her long brown hair out of her face. “We’re almost finished with labeling these.”
My friend, Janet, quickly jumps onto a seat next to me. “We’ll help finish them off!”
She grabs a paper bag and a green marker. Then, looking at the back of another paper bag with writing on it, Janet quickly copies it down on her bag.
Boston Korea Seventh Day Adventist Church: Written in a spiky green script, the sign proudly displays its origins. My eyes scan the rest of the bags, wondering if I could somehow wriggle my way out of this menial task.
Marker. Paper. Me. Oh, my god. Dolphins. I can draw dolphins onto the paper bags! Teehee, ain’t I so smart?
My thought process, after a bout of arguing with itself whether or not I’m skilled enough to draw invertebrate mammals, finally comes to the conclusion of me making myself useful by doodling random images onto the back of the paper bags. Namely bunnies ‘cuz everyone likes bunnies.
It’s a crisp Saturday afternoon, one in which I’m spending at church. Because, you know, it’s, like, my religion. I’m supposed to go to church on every Saturday.
Recently, my youth group decided to take on some community service projects. It’s been a huge improvement over waiting around on overstuffed couches for our parents to come out of their meetings. Right now, we’re all involved in Operation: Distributing Provisions to Unfortunate Suburban Mendicants- meaning that we’re going to drive to Boston and hand out bagged lunches to the homeless.
While the other half of the youth group are making mutated burritos out of meatless turkey, lettuce, pita bread, and salsa, Annie, Janet, and I are all just messing around and drawing random faces onto the paper bags. Later, we also fill them up with juice boxes and Korean snacks.
The rest of the youth group finally wrap up the burritos in foil. The finished product reminds me of a molten lump of silver. There’s also some burritos that are flat and rectangular, while there’s one that’s shaped…like a heart.
I guess that’s a way of saying that we have a lot of love.
“Whoa, they look radioactive,” I call out to the youth group leader, Juhyun.
Juhyun tilts her head sideways and gives me an overly exaggerated smile. She replies “Oh, really? It’s such a pity that you couldn’t help us- maybe you could‘ve done better.”
“Hey, I was too busy decorating these ugly bags!” I smile and shrug.
We load up the lunch bags into three boxes and carry them to two vans. Before climbing into one of the vans, I quickly write down Juhyun’s phone number on my hand. That way, even if I get lost, I can still ask some random guy, borrow his cell, and call her.
Somehow, perhaps by the miracle of God, I manage to squeeze into a van along with eight other people. I’m cooped up in the back with the two youngest members, Yubin and Youjung, and with Janet. In the front two seats are Annie and Peyton. In the very front is Esther, and her mom.
It takes at least an hour’s drive of chatting about cheesecakes and playing Temple Run (it’s a pity that I only reached twenty-three thousand points. Stupid bridge gaps.) before we finally reach a quaint, busy-looking crossroad with multitudes of people talking on their phones or excitedly conversing with each other. The earthy beat of a drum percolates through the air and lends this rambling chaos a sort of rhythm, a sort of intensity that sharpens the experience.
We finally reached Harvard’s Square.
I rush out of the van and step onto good, solid land. I dance around a bit, before Annie ushers us to a bookstore called the Coop. One more van drives by and drops off the rest of our little association. We all huddle together and count off by threes to form groups.
I stamp my feet and groan when I realize that I have no Janet to torture. Instead, I’m stuck with Joseph, Juhyun, Esther, and Yubin. Joseph, due to him being the token male, is forced to carry the box of bags, and the group troops down our designated street.
I don’t really pay attention to where I’m going, as seeing I’m too busy writing down everything in a small notebook. I plan on writing the whole experience down to, I don’t know, create some kind of thought-provoking magnum opus that wryly comments about the conditions of the poor. Maybe I might actually get a character-developing lesson out of this, or get some great epiphany about life.
Juhyun, meanwhile, is charged with the task to make sure that I don’t walk straight into a rushing car or anything.
Within minutes of scouring the streets, we see an old man slumped against the brick wall of a candle store. In his gnarly, liver-spotted hands, he holds a cardboard sign. The cotton gray hat on his balding head droops over his eyes, while his pale blue eyes stare down at the hems of his black flannel jacket.
“Um, excuse me!” Esther quickly grabs a paper bag- I look up for a second to notice that it’s the one that I drew a drunken bunny on- and rushes to the old man. “Would you like a lunch? It’s not much, but…”
The man stares up at her and blinks. Then he blinks more and more rapidly, until his lids resemble the wings of a hummingbird.
“You think he’s crying?” I nudge Joseph and mumble into his ear.
“Kinda.”
A few more seconds tick by, until the man finally accepts the bag with a shaking hand. He nods to us and thanks us in a throaty croak. We smile and nod back at him before we move on.
We take a few more steps, until Joseph points out a black man with a scruffy, brown hat. He’s sitting on a black crate, resting his head on his hands. Occasionally, he looks up and asks people for money. The people shake their heads at him and quicken their pace.
Quickly, like we’re trying to catch a Pokemon or something, we rush to the dude and offer him a paper bag. That one, I notice, is graced with the image of a voluptuous woman. The back of my neck suddenly starts burning when Juhyun and Esther look at me with raised brows.
“Thank you, thank you,” The man hugs the bag close to his chest.
“Oh, uh, you can take as many as you want!” Esther blurts out.
The man stares at her, before he shakes his head. “Good golly, no! It’s okay, but there’s other hungry people out there. Feed them first before giving me seconds.”
My ears perk up when they hear that phrase. I tear out my notebook and scribble down the saying into my notes.
“You know,” Juhyun says as we’re trudging through the streets, “I don’t think that we’re going to hand a lot of bags out. Let’s go someplace else.” And we head back to the Coop.
Right outside of the Coop is a man with dark skin and a pearly grin. His dreadlocks are tied back with a black cap, and he’s warmly clothed with a black hoodie. In his huge hands are a pair of sticks. He beats them against a bunch of buckets and weave together a raucous melody of beats and bams and thumps. Next to him is an old, worn-out leather boot. People crowd around him, whip out their I-Phones and snap pictures of him. Some of them just stand there, tapping their feet and bobbing their heads.
“Hey! Check out that drummer guy!” I look behind me and see Janet’s smiling face. Behind her are Annie and Sabrina. “Isn’t that so cool?” She asks me, mimicking the drummer.
I just shrug, ask her to hold my notebook and pencil, and rub my hands together. I snort when I see that they only have two bags left.
“We met a whole crowd of them at a plaza,” Annie gushes, waving her hands around. “They kept on telling us how sweet we were!”
A few more minutes pass by as we wait for the third group. I stay back under the arches of the shop, while the others go out to stare at the drummer. I, too, take a step out when I hear the last twang of a stick hitting a bucket.
A stocky, hooded man, one who’s sitting right in front of the drummer, starts whooping and patting his back. The drummer chuckles. He looks up and sees a small, pudgy boy with his chubby little fingers stuck in his ears.
The man stands up, stretches out his legs, and holds the little boy tight to him. Then he crouches down and whispers something to him. The little boy’s eyes widen and his head starts bobbing up and down.
Soon, the third group arrives. Eunjin, the second youth group leader, ushers everyone inside to the warmth of the bookstore. I stay outside to jot down some notes about the weather.
-weather is kind of cold, too much wind, sky is a smoky pale bl
That’s as much as I get before Juhyun tugs me into the store.
As soon as my feet cross over the threshold, it’s as if there’s a clock of warmth pressing down on me. I take in the spiral staircases, the large circle tables with piles of books stacked on them, and the book-laden shelves tacked onto the circular walls. I walk over to a table and flip open a book titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The words are a sudden blur in my mind when someone taps me on the shoulder. My heart starts racing when I’m confronted with a complete stranger. I scan the Coop for any signs of Esther, Juhyun, Eunjin- but they’re all gone!
Aw, dang- now I’m really going to have to borrow someone’s cell and call Juhyun’s number.
He towers over me, completely blocking my view of everything. He says something to me in a low, almost guttural voice. It’s layered heavily with some kind of accent.
I ask him one, twice- at least four times for him to repeat what he’s saying. I try to tell him that I’m just a passerby, but he keeps on shaking his head and repeating whatever the heck he’s said before. I just keep on spouting a mix of random words in a futile attempt into making him think that I’m too stupid to ask for answers. He, however, repeatedly asks me the same question in that cursedly thick accent of his.
My memory of my dialogue’s a bit blurred now, but I’m pretty sure that I was about to tell him a list of my top favorite animes to make fun of when a sharp, high-pitched voice cuts through the din of the store.
“Jenny! What are you doing?”
I spot Eunjin’s pale, round face and I’m filled with relief. I bound over to her, hoping that she can answer the stranger’s question for me. She, too, is floored so she just shoves him towards the customer service. The man refuses to go away, and he repeats the same question-
And oh, my god. “Do you know when the open-mic event is? I wrote a poem and I want to read it out loud here.”
I finally understand what he’s saying.
“Sir,” I say, “It’s on the twelfth of April.” I cross my fingers and pray that it isn’t too far off from the actual date. “But you might want to recheck with customs.” And with that, Eunjin grabs my hand and rushes me outside.
“If he’s that eager, he’ll eventually find a way to do it.” Eunjin huffs a bit and shakes her head. Then she turns to me. “Thank god we found you. Keep up, ‘kay?”
As soon as I’m reunited with the group, we stroll past stalls of men selling friendship bracelets, freshly painted snapshots of the landscape, sticks of candy, of candles- I think I even saw a guy trying to sell a jar of powdered teeth.
Along the way, amidst Annie and Esther’s intriguing study into the theory of whether or not having a boyfriend in the winter season is beneficial, the discussion suddenly warps into whether or not someone’s homeless.
“Oh, my god, Janet!” Annie suddenly bursts out. “I remember how when we were in the train station, Janet took a bag and tried to give it to someone- but it turned out that the person wasn’t homeless!”
We all roar out in laughter. We take a few more steps, when suddenly Janet stops us.
“Hey, she’s homeless! We should give her another bag!” She points to a red-haired woman slumped against the wall. Laying on her side is a piece of soggy cardboard with blurred words on it.
When the woman notices us looking at her, she smiles a bit and holds up her sign with shaky hands.
“No, Janet, we already gave her one.” Esther says. “We have to spread them out equally.”
“But-!” The word’s barely out of Janet’s mouth before Esther quickly interjects.
“We’ll find more people in the Boston commons. We might even find a whole family to feed.”
A whole family? Will we really find a whole, complete family- not just a nuclear one. I mean, like, including the grandparents and all- will we really find them all living outside on the streets? That can’t be possible…they can’t all be poor. A whole family being homeless is impossible! There has to be at least one relative whose life didn’t get screwed over.
Janet finally sighs and lets it go. The group walks back to the Coop, and Janet and I go up the elevator to take a restroom break. We pass by the Literary Criticism and Judaica, before I finally find the bathroom and park in front of it. I groan when I see a line of women trail from the door.
Slowly, eventually, one by one, the women clear out. The chick before me takes way too long. I time her on my I-Pod and see that she took twelve minutes and thirty two seconds. By the time Janet and I go back downstairs, I’m met with the most anticlimactic ending ever.
“What do you mean we have to go?” I practically screech at Juhyun and Eunjin. “We still have to give bags out to the homeless, don’t we?”
Juhyun looks at me with a mixture of amusement and pity. “Sorry, but you guys took too long in the privy. The others already went on without you. We might as well head back to church.”
Um, what? Just to clarify, I say my thoughts out loud. “Um, what?”
“C’mon, we’re going back to church.” Eunjin says.
From beside me, Janet pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you can interview the others when they come back. You don’t have to witness everything first-hand for yourself.”
Eunjin looks over at my notebook. “Oh, what’s that? Are you writing a story based off of this?”
I don’t really say anything. I’m just standing there, my eyes are protruding out, and my throat has a sudden lump stuck in it. My eyes prick a bit. Then I hurl my notebook at the ground and stomp on it.
“Jenny!” Eunjin shakes her head.
I explode. “Oh. My. God. What the ****? What kind of ending is that? How the **** am I supposed to get a ****ing meaningful experience if I’m just going home? You’ve got to be ****ing kidding me!”
It takes at least thirty minutes of Janet debasing herself as a slapstick comedian that I finally get rid of the urge to stab something with the pencil. On the ride to church, I mull over everything that I wrote down in my notebook.
Once you got down to it, there wasn’t anything really special about this whole event. Throughout the whole thing, I’ve been waiting for that warm fuzzy glow that you supposedly got from helping the needy- but really, I just didn’t care. I kept on waiting to feel my heart being touched, to feel that motivation of living a better, more purposeful life of not taking anything for granted. That’s a total fantasy, though.
I don’t think it’s because I haven’t seen true poverty. Maybe if I visit Cameroon or Haiti and see the scrawny kids with their bloated bellies, just maybe I’d feel something…but right now in America, nothing inspires any pathos for me.
Maybe someday, somewhere in the distant future, I might feel something. I really hope that I do. I don’t want to foist my apathy upon these undeserving people. Everyone deserves equal attention and intensity.
But in the meanwhile, my only feelings about this whole experience are meh. Mehmehmehmehmeh. No, really though.
Meh.
I’m leaning against the back of my chair, drumming my fingers as fast as I can against the surface of the table. I wait for a second, stare at the parade of brown bags in front of me, then slowly extend a hand for a blue marker.
“So, uh…” I gulp a bit. “I guess I’ll start prettying these up?”
The girl across from me, Annie, laughs. “Oh my god, Jenny, you’ve been staring at the bags for, like, an hour.” She flips her long brown hair out of her face. “We’re almost finished with labeling these.”
My friend, Janet, quickly jumps onto a seat next to me. “We’ll help finish them off!”
She grabs a paper bag and a green marker. Then, looking at the back of another paper bag with writing on it, Janet quickly copies it down on her bag.
Boston Korea Seventh Day Adventist Church: Written in a spiky green script, the sign proudly displays its origins. My eyes scan the rest of the bags, wondering if I could somehow wriggle my way out of this menial task.
Marker. Paper. Me. Oh, my god. Dolphins. I can draw dolphins onto the paper bags! Teehee, ain’t I so smart?
My thought process, after a bout of arguing with itself whether or not I’m skilled enough to draw invertebrate mammals, finally comes to the conclusion of me making myself useful by doodling random images onto the back of the paper bags. Namely bunnies ‘cuz everyone likes bunnies.
It’s a crisp Saturday afternoon, one in which I’m spending at church. Because, you know, it’s, like, my religion. I’m supposed to go to church on every Saturday.
Recently, my youth group decided to take on some community service projects. It’s been a huge improvement over waiting around on overstuffed couches for our parents to come out of their meetings. Right now, we’re all involved in Operation: Distributing Provisions to Unfortunate Suburban Mendicants- meaning that we’re going to drive to Boston and hand out bagged lunches to the homeless.
While the other half of the youth group are making mutated burritos out of meatless turkey, lettuce, pita bread, and salsa, Annie, Janet, and I are all just messing around and drawing random faces onto the paper bags. Later, we also fill them up with juice boxes and Korean snacks.
The rest of the youth group finally wrap up the burritos in foil. The finished product reminds me of a molten lump of silver. There’s also some burritos that are flat and rectangular, while there’s one that’s shaped…like a heart.
I guess that’s a way of saying that we have a lot of love.
“Whoa, they look radioactive,” I call out to the youth group leader, Juhyun.
Juhyun tilts her head sideways and gives me an overly exaggerated smile. She replies “Oh, really? It’s such a pity that you couldn’t help us- maybe you could‘ve done better.”
“Hey, I was too busy decorating these ugly bags!” I smile and shrug.
We load up the lunch bags into three boxes and carry them to two vans. Before climbing into one of the vans, I quickly write down Juhyun’s phone number on my hand. That way, even if I get lost, I can still ask some random guy, borrow his cell, and call her.
Somehow, perhaps by the miracle of God, I manage to squeeze into a van along with eight other people. I’m cooped up in the back with the two youngest members, Yubin and Youjung, and with Janet. In the front two seats are Annie and Peyton. In the very front is Esther, and her mom.
It takes at least an hour’s drive of chatting about cheesecakes and playing Temple Run (it’s a pity that I only reached twenty-three thousand points. Stupid bridge gaps.) before we finally reach a quaint, busy-looking crossroad with multitudes of people talking on their phones or excitedly conversing with each other. The earthy beat of a drum percolates through the air and lends this rambling chaos a sort of rhythm, a sort of intensity that sharpens the experience.
We finally reached Harvard’s Square.
I rush out of the van and step onto good, solid land. I dance around a bit, before Annie ushers us to a bookstore called the Coop. One more van drives by and drops off the rest of our little association. We all huddle together and count off by threes to form groups.
I stamp my feet and groan when I realize that I have no Janet to torture. Instead, I’m stuck with Joseph, Juhyun, Esther, and Yubin. Joseph, due to him being the token male, is forced to carry the box of bags, and the group troops down our designated street.
I don’t really pay attention to where I’m going, as seeing I’m too busy writing down everything in a small notebook. I plan on writing the whole experience down to, I don’t know, create some kind of thought-provoking magnum opus that wryly comments about the conditions of the poor. Maybe I might actually get a character-developing lesson out of this, or get some great epiphany about life.
Juhyun, meanwhile, is charged with the task to make sure that I don’t walk straight into a rushing car or anything.
Within minutes of scouring the streets, we see an old man slumped against the brick wall of a candle store. In his gnarly, liver-spotted hands, he holds a cardboard sign. The cotton gray hat on his balding head droops over his eyes, while his pale blue eyes stare down at the hems of his black flannel jacket.
“Um, excuse me!” Esther quickly grabs a paper bag- I look up for a second to notice that it’s the one that I drew a drunken bunny on- and rushes to the old man. “Would you like a lunch? It’s not much, but…”
The man stares up at her and blinks. Then he blinks more and more rapidly, until his lids resemble the wings of a hummingbird.
“You think he’s crying?” I nudge Joseph and mumble into his ear.
“Kinda.”
A few more seconds tick by, until the man finally accepts the bag with a shaking hand. He nods to us and thanks us in a throaty croak. We smile and nod back at him before we move on.
We take a few more steps, until Joseph points out a black man with a scruffy, brown hat. He’s sitting on a black crate, resting his head on his hands. Occasionally, he looks up and asks people for money. The people shake their heads at him and quicken their pace.
Quickly, like we’re trying to catch a Pokemon or something, we rush to the dude and offer him a paper bag. That one, I notice, is graced with the image of a voluptuous woman. The back of my neck suddenly starts burning when Juhyun and Esther look at me with raised brows.
“Thank you, thank you,” The man hugs the bag close to his chest.
“Oh, uh, you can take as many as you want!” Esther blurts out.
The man stares at her, before he shakes his head. “Good golly, no! It’s okay, but there’s other hungry people out there. Feed them first before giving me seconds.”
My ears perk up when they hear that phrase. I tear out my notebook and scribble down the saying into my notes.
“You know,” Juhyun says as we’re trudging through the streets, “I don’t think that we’re going to hand a lot of bags out. Let’s go someplace else.” And we head back to the Coop.
Right outside of the Coop is a man with dark skin and a pearly grin. His dreadlocks are tied back with a black cap, and he’s warmly clothed with a black hoodie. In his huge hands are a pair of sticks. He beats them against a bunch of buckets and weave together a raucous melody of beats and bams and thumps. Next to him is an old, worn-out leather boot. People crowd around him, whip out their I-Phones and snap pictures of him. Some of them just stand there, tapping their feet and bobbing their heads.
“Hey! Check out that drummer guy!” I look behind me and see Janet’s smiling face. Behind her are Annie and Sabrina. “Isn’t that so cool?” She asks me, mimicking the drummer.
I just shrug, ask her to hold my notebook and pencil, and rub my hands together. I snort when I see that they only have two bags left.
“We met a whole crowd of them at a plaza,” Annie gushes, waving her hands around. “They kept on telling us how sweet we were!”
A few more minutes pass by as we wait for the third group. I stay back under the arches of the shop, while the others go out to stare at the drummer. I, too, take a step out when I hear the last twang of a stick hitting a bucket.
A stocky, hooded man, one who’s sitting right in front of the drummer, starts whooping and patting his back. The drummer chuckles. He looks up and sees a small, pudgy boy with his chubby little fingers stuck in his ears.
The man stands up, stretches out his legs, and holds the little boy tight to him. Then he crouches down and whispers something to him. The little boy’s eyes widen and his head starts bobbing up and down.
Soon, the third group arrives. Eunjin, the second youth group leader, ushers everyone inside to the warmth of the bookstore. I stay outside to jot down some notes about the weather.
-weather is kind of cold, too much wind, sky is a smoky pale bl
That’s as much as I get before Juhyun tugs me into the store.
As soon as my feet cross over the threshold, it’s as if there’s a clock of warmth pressing down on me. I take in the spiral staircases, the large circle tables with piles of books stacked on them, and the book-laden shelves tacked onto the circular walls. I walk over to a table and flip open a book titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. The words are a sudden blur in my mind when someone taps me on the shoulder. My heart starts racing when I’m confronted with a complete stranger. I scan the Coop for any signs of Esther, Juhyun, Eunjin- but they’re all gone!
Aw, dang- now I’m really going to have to borrow someone’s cell and call Juhyun’s number.
He towers over me, completely blocking my view of everything. He says something to me in a low, almost guttural voice. It’s layered heavily with some kind of accent.
I ask him one, twice- at least four times for him to repeat what he’s saying. I try to tell him that I’m just a passerby, but he keeps on shaking his head and repeating whatever the heck he’s said before. I just keep on spouting a mix of random words in a futile attempt into making him think that I’m too stupid to ask for answers. He, however, repeatedly asks me the same question in that cursedly thick accent of his.
My memory of my dialogue’s a bit blurred now, but I’m pretty sure that I was about to tell him a list of my top favorite animes to make fun of when a sharp, high-pitched voice cuts through the din of the store.
“Jenny! What are you doing?”
I spot Eunjin’s pale, round face and I’m filled with relief. I bound over to her, hoping that she can answer the stranger’s question for me. She, too, is floored so she just shoves him towards the customer service. The man refuses to go away, and he repeats the same question-
And oh, my god. “Do you know when the open-mic event is? I wrote a poem and I want to read it out loud here.”
I finally understand what he’s saying.
“Sir,” I say, “It’s on the twelfth of April.” I cross my fingers and pray that it isn’t too far off from the actual date. “But you might want to recheck with customs.” And with that, Eunjin grabs my hand and rushes me outside.
“If he’s that eager, he’ll eventually find a way to do it.” Eunjin huffs a bit and shakes her head. Then she turns to me. “Thank god we found you. Keep up, ‘kay?”
As soon as I’m reunited with the group, we stroll past stalls of men selling friendship bracelets, freshly painted snapshots of the landscape, sticks of candy, of candles- I think I even saw a guy trying to sell a jar of powdered teeth.
Along the way, amidst Annie and Esther’s intriguing study into the theory of whether or not having a boyfriend in the winter season is beneficial, the discussion suddenly warps into whether or not someone’s homeless.
“Oh, my god, Janet!” Annie suddenly bursts out. “I remember how when we were in the train station, Janet took a bag and tried to give it to someone- but it turned out that the person wasn’t homeless!”
We all roar out in laughter. We take a few more steps, when suddenly Janet stops us.
“Hey, she’s homeless! We should give her another bag!” She points to a red-haired woman slumped against the wall. Laying on her side is a piece of soggy cardboard with blurred words on it.
When the woman notices us looking at her, she smiles a bit and holds up her sign with shaky hands.
“No, Janet, we already gave her one.” Esther says. “We have to spread them out equally.”
“But-!” The word’s barely out of Janet’s mouth before Esther quickly interjects.
“We’ll find more people in the Boston commons. We might even find a whole family to feed.”
A whole family? Will we really find a whole, complete family- not just a nuclear one. I mean, like, including the grandparents and all- will we really find them all living outside on the streets? That can’t be possible…they can’t all be poor. A whole family being homeless is impossible! There has to be at least one relative whose life didn’t get screwed over.
Janet finally sighs and lets it go. The group walks back to the Coop, and Janet and I go up the elevator to take a restroom break. We pass by the Literary Criticism and Judaica, before I finally find the bathroom and park in front of it. I groan when I see a line of women trail from the door.
Slowly, eventually, one by one, the women clear out. The chick before me takes way too long. I time her on my I-Pod and see that she took twelve minutes and thirty two seconds. By the time Janet and I go back downstairs, I’m met with the most anticlimactic ending ever.
“What do you mean we have to go?” I practically screech at Juhyun and Eunjin. “We still have to give bags out to the homeless, don’t we?”
Juhyun looks at me with a mixture of amusement and pity. “Sorry, but you guys took too long in the privy. The others already went on without you. We might as well head back to church.”
Um, what? Just to clarify, I say my thoughts out loud. “Um, what?”
“C’mon, we’re going back to church.” Eunjin says.
From beside me, Janet pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’m sure you can interview the others when they come back. You don’t have to witness everything first-hand for yourself.”
Eunjin looks over at my notebook. “Oh, what’s that? Are you writing a story based off of this?”
I don’t really say anything. I’m just standing there, my eyes are protruding out, and my throat has a sudden lump stuck in it. My eyes prick a bit. Then I hurl my notebook at the ground and stomp on it.
“Jenny!” Eunjin shakes her head.
I explode. “Oh. My. God. What the ****? What kind of ending is that? How the **** am I supposed to get a ****ing meaningful experience if I’m just going home? You’ve got to be ****ing kidding me!”
It takes at least thirty minutes of Janet debasing herself as a slapstick comedian that I finally get rid of the urge to stab something with the pencil. On the ride to church, I mull over everything that I wrote down in my notebook.
Once you got down to it, there wasn’t anything really special about this whole event. Throughout the whole thing, I’ve been waiting for that warm fuzzy glow that you supposedly got from helping the needy- but really, I just didn’t care. I kept on waiting to feel my heart being touched, to feel that motivation of living a better, more purposeful life of not taking anything for granted. That’s a total fantasy, though.
I don’t think it’s because I haven’t seen true poverty. Maybe if I visit Cameroon or Haiti and see the scrawny kids with their bloated bellies, just maybe I’d feel something…but right now in America, nothing inspires any pathos for me.
Maybe someday, somewhere in the distant future, I might feel something. I really hope that I do. I don’t want to foist my apathy upon these undeserving people. Everyone deserves equal attention and intensity.
But in the meanwhile, my only feelings about this whole experience are meh. Mehmehmehmehmeh. No, really though.
Meh.
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[[Tab: Tropes That Might or Might Not Be Able to be Applied to the Sympathizer of Caligula]]:
to:
* I sympathize with you
* You will probably get annoyed of me in three days or
* Expect no snark from me
* I'm in love with Deadpool
* I am a Mary Sue- or at least I wish that I was...
* You know what? I am. I AM A MARY SUE.
* I'm also a Yaoi Fangirl
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Changed line(s) 1,9 (click to see context) from:
This troper sympathizes heavily with Caligula. He was a misunderstood man who just wanted peace and love and harmony and all that fun stuff. Sure, he did blow his head off a few times but...blech.
Who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Wide Eyed Idealist}} and a {{Yaoi Fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{Deadpan Snarker}}s. After all, the level of sarcasm you use on a daily basis is definitely proportionate to how cool you are on the Internet (or, more specifically, Google Chrome).
Who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Wide Eyed Idealist}} and a {{Yaoi Fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{Deadpan Snarker}}s. After all, the level of sarcasm you use on a daily basis is definitely proportionate to how cool you are on the Internet (or, more specifically, Google Chrome).
to:
[[Tab: Tropes That Might or Might Not Be Able to be Applied to the
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Changed line(s) 5,6 (click to see context) from:
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} (well, I'm a loner and I also think that I'm rather nice...although YMMV) and a {{Yaoi Fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
to:
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} (well, I'm a loner and I also think that I'm rather nice...although YMMV) {{Wide Eyed Idealist}} and a {{Yaoi Fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
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None
Changed line(s) 5,6 (click to see context) from:
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} and a {{Yaoi Fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
to:
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} (well, I'm a loner and I also think that I'm rather nice...although YMMV) and a {{Yaoi Fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
Is there an issue? Send a MessageReason:
None
Changed line(s) 1,9 (click to see context) from:
This troper sympathizes heavily with Caligula. He was a misunderstood man who just wanted peace and love and harmony and all that fun stuff. Sure, he did blow his head off a few times but-
who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} and a {{yaoi fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{Deadpan Snarkers}}. After all, the level of sarcasm you use on a daily basis is definitely proportionate to how cool you are on the Internet (or, more specifically, Google Chrome).
who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} and a {{yaoi fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{Deadpan Snarkers}}. After all, the level of sarcasm you use on a daily basis is definitely proportionate to how cool you are on the Internet (or, more specifically, Google Chrome).
to:
This troper sympathizes heavily with Caligula. He was a misunderstood man who just wanted peace and love and harmony and all that fun stuff. Sure, he did blow his head off a few times but-
whobut...blech.
Who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} and a{{yaoi fangirl}}.{{Yaoi Fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
I am a {{MarySue}}.
Sue}}.
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{DeadpanSnarkers}}.Snarker}}s. After all, the level of sarcasm you use on a daily basis is definitely proportionate to how cool you are on the Internet (or, more specifically, Google Chrome).
who
Who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} and a
I am a {{Mary
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{Deadpan
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Tropers
Added DiffLines:
This troper sympathizes heavily with Caligula. He was a misunderstood man who just wanted peace and love and harmony and all that fun stuff. Sure, he did blow his head off a few times but-
who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} and a {{yaoi fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{Deadpan Snarkers}}. After all, the level of sarcasm you use on a daily basis is definitely proportionate to how cool you are on the Internet (or, more specifically, Google Chrome).
who am I kidding. I actually just chose this name because it sounded cool.
I am a {{Misunderstood Loner With A Heart of Gold}} and a {{yaoi fangirl}}. I am also an {{Extreme Doormat}}. Hmmm...I also wish that I am a {{Mary Sue}} so I will just say that I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
I am a {{Mary Sue}}.
Unlike many other people on this site, do not expect any snark from me. Snarking is a foreign action, one that I barely have any ambition for. However, if you feel the need to teach me how to snark, then please teach me so I, too, can conform into this acidic society of {{Deadpan Snarkers}}. After all, the level of sarcasm you use on a daily basis is definitely proportionate to how cool you are on the Internet (or, more specifically, Google Chrome).
