Quickly, and Un-Dramatically, Acts of Kindness Done

Done were the following four anonymous acts of kindness:

1. Someone asked Dorian for bus fair at the Olney transit center and, after giving his automatic cold refusal, took a moment, and thought: ‘Hey, wait a second. Don’t I need to perform anonymous acts of kindness?”

2. Waiting for a late Amanda, Dorian asked a security guard at CCP if he could buy him a drink. A lemonade. The security guard had no problem with receiving another (pink) lemonade. After all, he was almost finished with the one he was drinking.

3. Amanda left a coupon for a sharp discount at the counter of an-unknown-by-Dorian craft store. The coupon was meant to wait there, until a discovery by a costumer, at which time it would save said costumer some dollars.

4. CCP (the northwest campus) is holding a holiday gift drive for old toys. Old toys could be placed in a large bin, whereupon they would be destined for a deserving child. Dorian has placed a kite into this very bin.

Which means, with these four acts of kindness, the “Perform 20 anonymous acts of kindness” challenge is done.

Acts of Kindness Numbers 15 and 16

We have reached the 75% way point of our 20 acts of kindness challenge!

Our 15th challenge was a little bit…shall we say…”quirkier.” Namely, it involved parading about in a fluffy feathered chicken costume. In public.

Yes. On Halloween, we dressed up as a farmer and his faithful friend free-range chicken (in sneakers, for running around all that free range), and then went out to eat, in a very public Chipotle restaurant. Because we dressed up in costumes “inspired by the family farm”, Chipotle discounted our meals to $2 a piece.

Wait a minute, you may or may not be thinking, that sounds like Chipotle was doing YOU an act of kindness.

And you would have a point. Except–because we were in costumes, our money went straight to supporting family farms. Without that added incentive (and to be honest, the incentive of writing this post, and moving one act closer to completing our 20), saving $5 probably would not have been enough to convince us to walk around outside looking like poultry.

We backed off on the quirk for our 16th challenge. This morning, while waiting for the bus, Dorian was approached by a man looking for bus fare. Dorian instinctively turned him down, but when the man continued to wait at the bus stop, studying the schedule, he re-approached the man and gave him the money. — A very straight-forward act of kindness, especially compared to some of our earlier ones, but sometimes those actually turn out to be the most helpful.

Act of Kindness 14/20 and an Unfortunate Accidental Collection of Tennis Puns

It is hard to believe we are only on our 14th act of kindness. It feels like we have been doing acts of kindness (or not doing them, or thinking about doing/not doing them) for a year–which if we do not hurry up and do the last five, we will have done.

My appreciation for random acts of kindness has definitely increased, as it really does take some effort to both THINK about doing the deed, and then do it. Especially if you are bent upon making every single act of kindness both creative and unique, which we seem to be (but may cease doing soon, as we more and more wistfully think about simply buying strangers coffee, and other classics).

Our latest: Let a Little Boy Try Tennis and Have a Ball (not a pun).

This may not seem that kind at first. But imagine– you have been playing tennis for an hour. You’ve gotten into the swing of things. Your muscles are warm, your heartbeat is in the zone, you are focused on crushing your opponent (even if, as we do, you don’t play games or matches…you just play each ball as its own potential domination factor).

Then, from your side, there’s a racket–a little boy is shaking the fence, trying to get your attention. “Yes?” you finally say, slightly exasperated, as your next serve was about to be a fireball. “Can I try?” he asks.

To be honest, we hesitated. But eventually we waved him in, and he delightly swung and (less delightly) hit a tennis ball out of the courts.

Later on, we let him keep a ball too.

It was one of those situations where, because we were in the middle of something, our initial inclination was to turn away things that were NOT in the middle of that something too. But letting the boy “try tennis” only took three minutes, which he enjoyed, and we enjoyed watching him enjoying.

Our tennis momentum was a little slowed, but overall, a net positive.

 

–Also. Side note: it seems impossible not to write something about tennis without making tennis puns. How many can YOU find?…and I PROMISE only the last one was intentional (maybe).

 

Writing a Prisoner Leads to More In-Depth Projects

A few posts back, we mentioned that we were creating a blog for our prisoner pen pal, Larry (who we met through our first round of challenges, in which we were challenged to correspond with a prisoner) as one of our 20 acts of kindness.

Larry is a Pennsylvania death row prisoner. He has been in prison for over 20 years, and has never been heard in court. He also does not know, in his words: “when the state of Pennsylvania will decide to kill me.”

From our correspondence with Larry, it seems as though a great deal of his time is spent trying to find a way to be heard in court, in a race against the unseen timer counting down to his execution.

Larry has dedicated himself to learning Pennsylvania law, in the hopes both of helping himself and his fellow prisoners who, he believes, all deserve a chance to speak for themselves.

He asked us to put up a blog stating his purpose and his plan, as well as requesting help in various ways. He sent us a long manuscript, which we typed up and put on a blog. We had originally put up the website with organized sections and tabs, but Larry requested that we return it to a single page and a single block of text as he had originally written it.

Here is address for now: www.larryrushinnocence.wordpress.com

Upgrades and Updates

There’s been so much going on, we thought it time for a little summary post.

First of all (and kind of exciting news)– we have “upgraded” our blog to a real, actual, website. Meaning, we have our own domain. It is easier to remember… it is shorter!

HERE IT IS:  www.difficult-things.com. If you want to make it even shorter, you can also cut out the “www.” What you CANNOT cut out is the hyphen between the word ‘difficult’ and the word ‘things’. If you do so, you will end up at the blog of a man named Jason who has a cat and a mustache.

Now for some updates on some of the challenges themselves:

1. Stage a Wild West Gunfight in an Urban Park:  This is the most important one! It’s this Saturday! If you or anyone you know is going to be in New York or Brooklyn, spread the word! We’re headed up there early tomorrow morning.
 
2. 20 Acts of Kindness: Yes, yes, we promised to do one a day for the last two weeks. But after the abysmal failure of our paper-based attempt, we went back to the longer-taking, elaborate sort. So far, we have done 12 out of the 20 required. Soon, we’ll post information about our prisoner pen-pal (a remnant from the first set of challenges) and his blog.

 
3. Teaching Each Other Things: We keep going back and forth on what to choose! There are so many options. So many things we want to force the other to do! But our decision on this, too, coming up.

 
4. Bike Ride to a Grandmother’s House: Since we have decided NOT to move to Vietnam this fall (instead we will be sticking around and writing, along with other projects, we have decided too to move this challenge to a time when the weather is cooler and the sun is less present. Probably at the end of September. Also, we still need to get bikes. If you have a bike that you would like to loan us for the summer, that’d be great!
 
5. Life-Sized Paper Mache of Dogs Playing Poker: This is deserving of it’s own post. But for now, enjoy some pictures:

Dorian has a way with animals

which one is the real dog? -almost impossible to tell

Brutally Honest Teachers Receive Gratitude (from Amanda)

I, too, have taken piano lessons at a woman’s home. But unlike Dorian, this teacher does not earn the number one spot in my list of teachers for whom I am most grateful. In fact, she doesn’t even make the top five.

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In Dorian’s post about his anonymous thank you letter, he ruminated on the possibility that perhaps it is just inherently (and unfairly) easier to feel grateful towards teachers who teach fun subjects. Well, I (Amanda) do not think this is the case. My music and art teachers actually fall quite low on my Gratefulness totem pole.

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The five teachers that I feel most grateful towards do not share a subject (or a subject category) at all. But the quality that they DO share is constructive honesty.Constructive honesty is different than “honesty.” Honesty is not inherently something to be thankful for. For example, I don’t feel grateful to the gym teacher that bought me a miniature basketball in his ‘honest’ appraisal of my ability to get the regular sized ball up to the hoop. This honesty…well, basically just means someone has assessed and given up. And it just makes you feel kind of bad.

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But when the honesty is also constructive, it can give direction–or make you much more confident in accepting your ability and pushing its limits. So–I feel grateful to my calculus teacher, who told me that my ability to write proofs was abominable, but also said that INSTEAD I should focus on visual problems. And I am grateful for my psychology professor, who gave me a B on a paper–not because it was a bad paper, he wrote next to it, but because he thought I personally didn’t live up to my ability.

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And to my English teacher, who was openly disapppointed that I did not love Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as much as he had expected me to (he did not know my lack of enthusiasm for it possibly resulted from me trying to read it all in one night).

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I wrote my letter to this last teacher, but I could have easily written a letter to any of the above.

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And perhaps I will! Just as Dorian said, it’s really pretty fun, writing thank you letters to people you actually feel thankful for.

Music Teachers Monopolize Top Slots in (Dorian’s) Top Ten Teachers I Feel Grateful Towards

It’s strange.  The teachers I end up feeling most grateful for are music teachers.  I remember how, in my yearbook senior year, I wrote an effusive (more or less) thank you note to the band teacher in my senior page.  I remember my mom being surprised at this.  And I remember saying: “We had a class that was just playing music!  It was right in the middle of the day!  It was just playing music with other people!  . . .”  Anyway, it was pretty awesome, and I know a lot of students don’t get that opportunity.

And so, when it came time now to write an anonymous thank you letter to a teacher that I appreciated (as an act of kindness), I did think about it a little bit, but the person I definitely and undoubtedly and X word for surety wanted to write to was my piano teacher, Mrs. Emmerick.

I mean, I took lessons at her house.  You know?  And for many, many, many years.  And she gave me a (really fairly large) bust of Beethoven for a high school graduation present.

Anyway, I’m not sure that my music teachers were my best teachers, or that music ended up being a huge influence on my life in some indirect way, or just that playing music somehow lights up or keys into gratitude (so that all music teachers have an advantage here—their teaching is being associated with music—the way you can get a dog to associate “Sit!” with a treat!) . . . BUT I  do feel grateful to my music teachers.

And just in case: I also feel grateful to other people, and other teachers.  I’m just writing a post about writing one anonymous letter!  And dong some very casual and brief musings.

(Shameless plug: You should write an anonymous letter to a teacher you feel grateful towards!  And, even if you don’t,  it’s just a lot of fun: making a list, Top Five Teachers You Feel Grateful Towards.  It might surprise you, and it might be interesting to see the patterns that emerge (music, for example) as you try it).

Acts of Kindness: Helping a Fellow Library Patron

Moving along with the acts of kindness.

Oddly, we seemed to feel that doing acts of kindness only really counted if people didn’t ASK for help. Perhaps this had something to do with the requirement that the act be anonymous?

Well, we realized this needn’t be the case. We are still working on setting up our prisoner pen-pal Larry’s blog, and yesterday we helped a man in the library who asked for help typing up a letter from his handwritten copy. (It was difficult to understand the letter, but it had something to do with Korean voting rights.)

As the man was leaving the library, he came over to our table with the letter in hand and did a little jump up and down. He didn’t speak English, but we think that means he appreciated what we did.

A run-down Dunkin Donuts. Rain. A suburban strip mall.

= a place quintessentially in need of some kindness.

We took a sheet of paper with seven kindness options printed on it, hoping to brighten the day of some employee inside by allowing him to receive the kindness act of his choice. He did not speak English well, and didn’t seem to understand the concept—so we asked him about his favorite fruit, and subsequently delivered him a bounty of apples and bananas.

His response? Anger.

Our response? Guilt, confusion.

What we had done was this: instead of presenting someone randomly with say, a pineapple, we tried to present them with exactly what they wanted. We thought giving them the chance to choose and customize their “gift” was more kind. But after this man’s response, we felt that perhaps we had actually done something UN-kind, because the receiver had to take on the burden of the choice–even though the choice itself was supposed to be PART of the kindness.

After some contemplation, we resolved that the act itself wasn’t less kind. But it was a mistake none-the-less, as the feeling of kindness received was less. So–why was less kindness imparted?

Having “choices” is something that most people value, but with choices comes a decision, and with a decision comes Responsibility and Regret. A classic paradox of choice —the more choices we have, the less happy we are with the choice we make.

Making a choice about receiving an act of kindness could turn what should be a simple act of receiving into a more complex act of “accepting” (feeling like you chose or asked for an act of kindness to be done for you), leading to guilt, the obligation of reciprocation, as well as regret for all the kindnesses options you didn’t choose.

We’re still counting the act as one of our twenty. Today we hung a bird feeder. Tomorrow we’re helping Larry (our prisoner pen-pal) by setting up a blog.

Elaborate Acts of Kindness Plan, or: How to Make Strangers Make Decisions for You

So.  We like the idea of the elaborate, secretly done act of kindness, where the stranger whose favorite food is bananas comes home from a long hard day only to find . . . BANANAS on his doorstep, just for him.

The thing with those though, is you gotta spy on people to find out what they secretly want. . . or else just do acts of kindness for people you already know.

We were challenged to do anonymous acts of kindness, so we didn’t really want to just do them (at least most of them) for people we knew.  We also—or at least one us—didn’t want to do any spying.

Well then, you might ask—how do you figure out what a complete stranger really wants, without spying on him or her? 

The answer, it turns out, is very simple: you just ask them.

So, our new and elaborate acts of kindness plan is to . . . simply ask people what particular thing they would like us to do for them.

Now, of course, we won’t just murder people, or give them all our money.

The idea is we give people seven options to choose from.  Each option is a reasonable, reasonably-sized, doable-that-day act of kindness, hopefully enough to make a stranger smile.  And many of them have the opportunity to get somebody else involved, or else be personalized in some way.

The seven options are:

 

1.  A Hug: And not some weak-ass hug, either.
2. Your Favorite Fruit: Purchased and delivered to you right here, whenever you want it. 
3. A (Not-Too-Serious) Song: About either the topic of your choice, or about you—as long as you don’t mind telling us a little bit about yourself. –we email you an audio file
4. Painting, Drawing, Collage, etc: You tell us what to paint, and we paint it.  Then we give it to you—or mail it.  (We can imitate styles, too).
5. The Perfect Book for Your Personality: You answer 20 questions from us, we mail you a book based on the answers that you give us.
6. Plant a Tree in Your Honor:  Probably in our backyard, but with a plaque (!) and pictures sent to you of the planting.
7. Secret Delivery: Choose a small, inexpensive item  (like a chocolate bar) and we will deliver it to the person of your choosing, immediately—as long as they are in the Philly metro area.

–and yes, we are going to walk up to people, probably people that we know will be in the same place for awhile (like service industry people) and then hand them a sheet of paper, kind of like a menu but for acts of kindness.

And then they choose what they want from the menu, and we give it to them.  Seems simple, doesn’t?  We’ll see how it ends up.  We will start on Monday, and will (probably) be posting an update every day until the 20 Acts of Kindness are complete.