This document is intended as an interrogation of fear of the ordinary, everyday, and mundane. It is an attempt to trace the boundaries and limits of these categories. It is a note on memories of where I have learned to fear and learned to love them.
Cameron Carr
LOVE LETTERS
TO THE EVERYDAY
I first saw Paperman
in a high school homeroom
And I loved it because it feared gray tedium
But I've come
to wonder why
And what is the alternative?
My homeroom
teacher was a quiet, reserved man—known for a notoriously difficult AP Lit
class. I dropped the class early to avoid the summer reading. But I went to his
poetry club anyway.
One day, at the prodding of an
administration unsure what to do with high school homeroom, he showed us this
video. Now I wonder if this was its own act of rebellion. We could have been
taking Meyer’s Briggs personality tests and debating the compatibility of INFJs
and ESTPs. I think, now, that part of his reservation was his own dread of
monotony (in teaching, every day is different, but the units repeat). But he
and his influence are another essay, a longer one. Paperman is a 2012
short film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios (the story is by Clio
Chiang and Kendelle Hoyer). It is a love story set in the gray monotony of
working life. A man and woman meet waiting for a train when the wind blows one
of his papers to her face. They laugh at the lipstick mark left on it, but they
lose each other. Until. There is always an until in love stories. Until he sees
her from his office window, at the building across the street. So he abandons
his work, turns it into paper planes to try to reach her. But they don’t.
Until. Until the planes return to find them both and guide them together.
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It doesn’t |
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LOVE |
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Really
say |
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WILL
NOT |
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Anything. |
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ARRIVE |
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This is |
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UNCALLED |
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The |
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ON |
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Problem. |
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PAPER PLANES |
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At the time it was enough to
believe that love could come and rescue me no matter how gray life became. I
have come to realize this is not enough. This solves nothing.
1.
Life will continue to be gray even after love. Even after the surreptitious kiss
on paper. Even after the thrill of disappearance. Even after rediscovery, from
a distance, and the longing that ensues. Even after all those paper planes.
Even after running out on your job. Even after finally finding love and holding
it.
2.
Who falls in love over a
piece of paper anyway? It doesn’t seem like a particularly
meaningful base for a relationship. It bothers me that the papers say nothing.
3.
Even with your paper love, life will continue to be gray all around you.
a. The
people will be gray b. the
trees will be gray c. the office you’ll still be
stuck in will be gray
4.
What I want is to learn to
love the ordinary all around us—to find love in the
ordinary all around us.
5.
If there is nothing to love
then create something. Change something. Don’t just convince yourself that a
piece of paper is love. Or, do. It might work.
6.
Instead of throwing blank
paper planes and hoping they’ll find love, I want to send out
messages that mean something. Even if the meaning is known to one person alone,
it might be read differently by someone else, it might be inspiration for
someone else. I like the idea of a fleet of love letters making community in
the sky.
IDEA IN ACTION
I
asked my students, friends, and colleagues to write their own little love
letters to their everydays. I asked them to fold the letters into paper planes.
I didn’t give them rules, and I didn’t give them instructions. They could write to people or things or places or
feelings, and they wrote to all of those things. Not that I read them, but some
people shared the things they love with me. And certain words are visible—like parts
of a mystery.
I don’t mean to say that I
don’t like Paperman, because I still do. It’s sweet. And maybe stories
like this can help us to believe, and to remember, that there are things around
us worth loving in ordinary moments. I think it would’ve been hard for my
teacher to explain this. Not that I didn’t love odd little everyday things, but
I’m not sure I yet recognized them as such. (One of my dearest friends liked to
wear short sleeves in winter because “it was the only time that we can get that
feeling,” which is ridiculous. It’s possible to be cold all year in all sorts
of outfits. But I still appreciate the sentiment.)
How lovely it is to collect these ordinary
things.
Recently, I’ve taken to the magic of
turmeric and ginger in my oatmeal.
Last week, I purchased muffins on the way
home from a run, just ‘cause.
Reading a story, aloud, before bed has
become a treat on tiring days.
And I should tell you about Matthew Lettering too.
One day in class, my teacher made a comment, about a
story maybe.
I wasn’t in the class, my teacher told me about it
only later, but the comment was something about cubicles, impersonalized and
dull.
The comment was something
about how we all dread this, how we all want something more from life than to
be sectioned off and managed.
But Matthew Lettering did not agree. Matthew Lettering was offended. Matthew Lettering said that some people work really hard to reach a cubicle and are happy to have something stable they can rely on and come back to. And my teacher felt bad. He hadn’t thought that some people don’t fear that world he saw as gray, or they don’t mind the gray. This is maybe different than what I mean by coming to love the everyday. But I’m not sure it is. Maybe Matthew Lettering had it right.
Really, little things like copying the formatting of a document shown briefly in a six-and-a-half-minute video can give meaning. This is an amended version of a design by Lisa Mantchev, thanks to Mantchev.
And thank you, Mr. Yuker
