List of demands: that growing up be slightly less awful, that a life be constructed of more than disappointment. These are gifts for the hopelessly angry, for the malcontent, for hearts with bills to pay – they are weak salves for our sorrow, and not even funny. They’re not enough, I know.
There’s a moment we’ve lost, historians say, when we turned away from thinking things could be improved through action and art and instead began to rely on psychic realignment — as though what’s making us unhappy is ourselves, and not the failing structures of this vicious unrelenting world.
For you’re the reason I don’t torch things to the ground and don’t lie in an empty bathtub for hours and try to lift the sorrow from my skin. You make things worth fixing.
So here are some things to use as you dismantle this morning, and the next, even if I don’t know what comes after, or if it will be any better, or if our hearts break because of the world we live in, or because they are our hearts.
Su Wu of I'm Revolting continues to compile a list of the things, places and misinterpreted philosophies that somehow manage to coalesce into a well-lived life. These narrative-driven collections will find you stealing out of your alternate personas' closets.
If fall truly is a time of year when reinvention is possible, no day is this more tangibly evident than on Halloween, that annual event for which tons of children literally re-imagine themselves as someone (or something) completely different. Halloween provides intrepid young minds with the opportunity to let their fantasies run wild in a way that would normally be frowned upon by adults. When else are kids given the freedom to dress however they’d like and run manically through the neighborhood, gobbling up candy from strangers? It’s like a childhood goldmine.
And it doesn’t last very long. The years between when a child recognizes the gift of Halloween for what it is and when he or she grows “too old” to trick or treat are few and fleeting. I remember the year I walked from house to house — dressed as a pretty awesome dragon, I might add — realizing I was older than all of the other children I saw in the neighborhood. I felt more like Godzilla, terrorizing the neighborhood kids and making all of the adults give me that grow up look. That realization is one of those dark markers of a childhood ending, similar to discovering that your mom is really the one eating the cookies left out for a certain jolly fat man.
Which is why it is bittersweet to watch Miles enter the age when he can begin to revel in the holiday. This year he’s going to be a fireman, which he’s very excited about, having spent the better part of the year with fire trucks as a favorite toy of choice. But next year he’ll begin choosing his own costume, and the transformative power of Halloween will be in full effect.
The question for us will be: How do we maximize the wonder and imaginative potential that Halloween provides for those few short years? As the holiday approaches, I’ve been giving it more thought, and I think there are two things we’ll want to focus on for Miles (and any subsequent children).
First, I want to extend Halloween to be more than just a day. I want to carve pumpkins, put up fun decorations, and get him thinking about what he wants to be early. Some families choose not to put much of a focus on extending Halloween’s magic, but why shouldn’t it be? Christmas gets the seasonal treatment — rightly deserved for its emphasis on selflessness and togetherness. But there’s something gloriously personal (and, let’s be honest, selfish) about choosing your own identity and eating tons of sweets that deserves to be celebrated in its own way.
Then I want to help Miles think outside the box for his costume. If he wants to be a character from his favorite television show, he of course will have the freedom to do so. But I think it’s so much more fun to come up with your own ideas for who you want to be. When I was a dragon, it was just because I loved dragons (geeky, I know). It was a homemade costume, one that was unique from every other kid on the block. Similarly, I want to encourage Miles to have fun coming up with his own ideas from his own imagination.
What are some of the crazy imaginative things that your kids do on Halloween?
Caleb Gardner is an amateur father and husband who writes at The Exceptional Man and dabbles in photography, design, and music. When listening to the cacophony of modern-day America, Caleb prefers a side of Scotch. He calls Chicago home, and in winter, less-nice things.
This might sound crazy — in fact, I know it will. But do yourself a favor, park your tuchus in any section of a retail store, and watch how people shop. “But Chappell,” you say, “I don’t want to be a creepy stalker like you.” Don’t worry, just be as discreet as possible — trench coats: optional — and watch how shoppers pick up products, testing their weight while carefully reading item descriptions. There is infinite entertainment in watching how shoppers determine what to buy — one person might buy a toaster simply because it comes with a red paint finish, and another chooses towels through a vigorous terrycloth-to-cheek methodology. While there are many factors that influence our purchasing decisions, there’s no doubt that the way a product is packaged plays a huge role.
Countless studies have concluded the same thing: the better an object looks on the shelf, the more likely we are to take it home. Just consider a store display of iPods — rows of impeccably molded plastic cases, almost just as desirable as the product inside. Yet knowing all of this did not prepare me for running across the unboxing trend — short, first-person videos of buyers unpacking recently purchased items. While most of the videos tend to focus on electronics, they run the gamut from packaged foods tofeminine hygiene products. So what is it about packaging that compels us to fetishize it just as much as the product housed within?
There is, in fact, a deep-rooted history behind the psychology of packaging. When Henry P. Crowell packaged what would later become Quaker Oats, he marketed them as “pure” by comparison with oats sold out of barrels in late 19th century general stores. By the 1950s, purity became a symbol of civilized supermarkets, where bruised fruit and dented cans were quickly removed. “In the First World,” writes Susan Willis in a study on commodity packaging, “the package is a fetishized sign of the desire for purity, which, in the fullest sense, is also a desire for security.”
The desire to rip open the packaging and pull out the object in proud wonderment is engrained in buyers from an early age. It is an act that, when considering product packaging, you might equate with gift wrapping. However, as Willis reminds us, the two are radically different: ”The anticipation we associate with the gift-wrapped present is for the unknown object. In anticipating a plastic-wrapped commodity, we imagine the experience of its use since its identity is already revealed.” When it comes to the imagination, we simply can’t help it — when we see a shiny, packaged product on the shelf, we envision putting it to use and how it would potentially improve everyday life.
We’ve all had our run-ins with effective packaging design. You might have oohed and aahed over the unboxing of a new iPod, opening its packaging as if it were a jewel case. Or you are all too familiar with the maddening frenzy that results from a seemingly impenetrable, heat-sealed plastic shell. Like a primate struggling with cracking a coconut, we resort to sharp objects — scissors, car keys — to free our purchase from its PVC prison. Perhaps nowhere is this hysteria so well documented as it is in a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which Larry David sinks into pure desperation as he struggles to release a new GPS system from its packaging (see above).
More than just an over-the-top, humorous observation about life, Larry’s depravity reveals just how packaging dangerously stokes our desire for the product within, reverting our civil manners to their caveman-like roots. This violent reaction to seeing and ultimately realeasing a desired object from its packaging is exactly what keeps companies designing newer, shiner boxes for their products. But over the coming years, alternative packaging solutions will certainly be a big topic as we try to get on better terms with Mother Nature. For now, we’ll have to weather the storm, recognizing when it’s the product we want, or the shiny case it comes in.
