More Life Lessons With Louie: Childhood Petitions and Regrets

Once again, this is a post about how a Louie episode made me reflect on an event in my life and feel like a piece of shit.

The other night I was watching the latest episode from this season and it featured my favorite character, Louie's daughter Jane. In this episode, they are walking to the doctor's office and she is explaining to him that she has no friends. Louie asks her about a girl he thought was her friend and she replies they aren't friends anymore. In fact, the girl started a petition at school asking, "Who hates Jane?" The whole class signed it.

I will help you destroy them, young one.

Kids can be so cruel. It's a cliche for a reason. The thing is, they're cruel in such devious ways that it's almost impressive. Who would think to write a petition like that? And actually have people sign it? That's cold on a massive level.

That's Louie. Although it is often completely absurd and surreal (the rest of this episode featured a horrifying monster stalking Louie's dreams) it is brutally honest about real life issues.

In this case, it was honest about kids' ability to be complete assholes. Which brings me to...me.

From Kindergarten through 8th grade, I attended E.B. Kennelly School in Hartford. In 5th grade, my teacher was Miss Calhoun, a tall, young, blonde hippy. At one point she made all of the students create our own lunch trays out of cardboard to protest the CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons--I'll give her this much, I never forgot that) in the styrofoam of the cafeteria trays. One day we simulated a biosphere, as seen in the Pauly Shore/Stephen Baldwin classic Bio-Dome. We were unable to leave the room for the entire day. We had to eat at our desks and we were allowed to go to the bathroom only once throughout the day.

One day she told us that we would have an exchange student from Israel in our class for a couple weeks. It was cool because we learned a little bit about Israel and the Middle East (the Gulf War occurred that year, too) to have some background knowledge of this new student in an effort to make his experience more comfortable.

His name was Ariel Bailey. He was quiet but friendly. I always liked him, but some of the girls in the class started to feel a certain way about his presence in our class. They felt Miss Calhoun was giving him too much attention. We were her real students and he was only temporary. Why should he get all this extra help just because he spoke a different language and was in a new country and his home country was in a perpetual war?

Sure enough, the girls wrote a petition saying Miss Calhoun spent too much time with him and asked everyone to sign it. I remember about 4 girls coming to my desk and telling me to sign it. When I asked why, they thought it was obvious. I didn't really understand it, but they were persistent and I wasn't, so I gave in. I didn't think much of it,  it was just a way to keep them happy and away from me.

Well, Miss Calhoun was definitely not happy when she received the petition. There was a parent teacher conference soon after and she told my mom how devastated she was that my name was on such a hateful list.

My mom was pissed of course, but even worse, she was disappointed.  My mom's method of expressing her disappointment always had the effect of making the recipient of her disappointment question their very purpose on this planet. After making sure I knew how disgusted she was, she told me I was going to apologize to Ariel.

I did, and I felt horrible. He wanted to know why I signed it and I gave him some half-assed excuse I can't even remember and I'm sure he didn't believe, but he forgave me. The truth is, I was just an average kid, and kids can be assholes, knowingly or unknowingly. They just don't fully think through their actions because they are mentally incapable of doing so yet. Children don't understand the impact of their cruelty and often don't even think of their actions as cruelty, just honesty. The problem is, honesty from their point of view is often skewed because they don't understand shit about life yet.

As an adult looking back at it, I'm upset with myself for not being strong enough to stand up to what I knew deep down was wrong; however, I'm happy my mom made me apologize and I'm proud that I went through with it. It was a little late, but it took courage. A little bit anyway. A very little bit. Whatever, it set the wheels of courage in motion.

I have often thought about this incident and I use it as motivation to stand up for myself and others. As a kid we don't know any better, but as an adult, there's no excuse for not standing up for yourself or standing idly by while others are picked on. It's not always easy. It takes mindfulness, confidence, and a willingness to withstand ridicule. For myself, I've realized that I hate regretting my own actions, or lack thereof, much more than I hate insults from bullies or people I disagree with. In fact, it feels good to stand up for yourself, and even more so to stand up for others. Give it a try!

Also, watch Louie.

I Love You All...Class Dismissed.

Life Lessons with Louie

In the last few days, I've been holding a personal Louie marathon on Netflix. I just reached season three's two-part episode, "Daddy's Girlfriend," where we meet Louie's version of the manic pixie dream girl. In one scene, they walk past a homeless man. She stops and talks to the man as Louie begs her to just keep walking. After hearing the man's story, they take him to a pharmacy to get his medication and then set him up in a hotel. It was a great episode of an off-kilter, sweet, bizarre, and sometimes mind-blowing series.

A few weeks ago, I went to New York City for dinner and a show with my lady. Soon after arriving in the city, we parked and walked towards a restaurant. We weren't in a rush, but we had to be aware of the time to make the show. As we walked down the busy street, an apparently homeless woman was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, in front of a large skyscraper in one of the richest cities in the world, begging desperately for help.

She looked at us as we passed by and said, "Help me, please."

I briefly looked at her, then looked past her and kept walking. Just like everyone else.

To anyone who frequents New York City, or any big city in America, this is not an unusual scene. Unfortunately, homelessness and poverty are all too common in our excessively wealthy country. It's embarrassing, really. But this isn't a post about the failures of our government, which would be extensive, it's a post about how we treat each other as individuals. How have we evolved to the point where it is socially acceptable, indeed socially expected and proper, to ignore pleas of help from another human being? How has our natural inclination to assist those in need completely disappeared in some situations?

I've seen countless homeless people in various states of coherence and sobriety and desperation. I sometimes give spare change when I have it, and at the very least I try to be respectful. Mostly, though, I try to ignore them. It's too depressing to look at them and think about their situations. I'm trying to enjoy my night out on the town and escape my own problems for a while, I don't want to face someone else's problems, too.

What a shitty way to think. But it's what gets us through. It's still shitty. Helping each and every homeless person you encounter in NYC would be impossible, though, and honestly, it wouldn't be so bad if we just did a little more overall: push for legislation that addresses poverty and mental illness, give more of your money to charities, volunteer some of your time to others instead of spending every night entertaining yourself. Solve the problem as a whole instead of treating the symptoms, or even worse, ignoring it.

As I said, I've seen countless homeless people. This woman struck a nerve, though. Her plea was so urgent and insistent. She didn't look physically hurt, so it didn't seem like a physical emergency. In that case, I (probably...hopefully) would have helped, at the very least I would have called for help, but this seemed to be a case of a mental breakdown, and that's just too scary to deal with (to be clear, it's not the people themselves that scare me, it's mental illness/disease/deterioration itself that terrifies me). In the brief instant I acknowledged this poor woman's existence, I envisioned what helping her (truly helping her) would entail, and I knew I wasn't capable. She needed more than a few spare dollars.

The scene from Louie flashed through my mind as I walked past her (it was a very quick mental association I made; I didn't even consciously remember that what I had envisioned was from the show until I viewed it again recently) and I knew I wasn't capable of providing that kind of assistance. But Louie is a show. An absurd (yet awesome) show, and that episode in particular is absurd and most likely an extended dream/fantasy sequence. The woman Louie is dating is too good to be true. Nobody goes out of their way to help others like that, that is why she was so special. But in actuality, we don't have to go to those lengths to help people in need. There are some people that need professional, sustained assistance, and we should do our best to provide that, but I'm talking about things we can do every day.

Maybe the homeless woman would have benefited from a friendly conversation, a kind gesture from a fellow human. Or maybe she was waiting to scam the first sucker to stop and offer her help (I've encountered enough con artists to instill in me a hearty sense of distrust). Or, more than likely, she suffered from some type of mental illness and needed psychiatric and pharmaceutical help. And that's not something you can offer when you're just visiting for dinner and a show.

But we shouldn't get caught up in the things we can't do for others, we should focus on the things we can. People appreciate the smallest things. Minor gestures have major impact. I've mentioned before how many people Kevin Briggs has saved simply by talking with them and genuinely listening to them. DMC of the legendary Run DMC decided to not kill himself after hearing the Sarah MacLachlan song on the radio (you know the one) and turned his life around after meeting her. There is an endless amount of stories about people doing small, generous things for others all the time (click those links, it will make your day!) and those small, unsolicited gestures bring the greatest pleasure to everybody involved. Enough people doing enough small things leads to big things. It's cliched, it's simple almost to the point of naivete, but I'll be damned if it ain't true.

As a prophet once said, "Be excellent to each other." It makes all the difference in the world.

I Love You All...Class Dismissed.