Recently there was a huge kerfuffle in the book world. I don’t want to get into that, but it punched up a feeling I’ve been having for a while. A blog I’ve started to write several times but stopped, unable to get a good grip on what I was trying to say.

Dean with all of his video game/anime stuff at work that makes him happy.

I think I’ve got it now.

One of my favorite things about people is the weird things that they emotionally attach to. My friend Lauren is super into artichokes right now and it’s adorable. She’s like a five-year-old that just discovered Bluey and now wants all Bluey stuff for Christmas. My husband loves 8-bit music. He makes playlists of it. He can pull it apart and discuss it thematically. Our friend Greg is in his forties and is incredibly jazzed about dinosaurs. And shark’s teeth. YES!

And!

Have I told you how much I like black licorice jelly beans? If I could buy an entire bag of black licorice jelly beans I would do it. It’s okay, you don’t have to like them. You just have to let me like them, even if you shake your head at me.

Look how happy Greg is! How could you deny anyone that joy?

I just love it when people are into something and unafraid to let that love shine. And I wish everyone could just let people be into the things that they like. I wish everyone could say, “Hey, not for me, but I’m so glad you’re into it.” Let’s gradually go a bit deeper.

In improv, the first and most basic rule is NOT the comedy rule of threes, but gold star for trying. It’s the rule of “yes and.” If you’re on stage and your improv partner says that you’re running a donut shop and you’re out of donuts, guess what? You’re running a donut shop and you’re out of donuts. Now, you get to say, “yes, I had a dream last night that donuts were over and muffins were in!” And people laugh at the absurdity and the improv goes from there.

Now what if you said, “You must be crazy, this was never a donut shop, this has always been a muffin shop.” Number one, you throw off your partner and negate anything they were trying to set up. Number two, although you may get a cheap laugh or two, it’s never as funny to call someone crazy. Number three, if your partner decides THEY aren’t going to YesAnd your muffin shop story, then you just get into an argument about who is crazy and the audience is bored to tears. Nobody wins.

When I was in college, I fell out with my passive-aggressive roommate. Short version: She moved out a week earlier than I did and decided to get in one last dig by telling the office that our apartment was empty. They rented it. My new lease didn’t start for five days. All of my friends found temporary places for all of my stuff and two of them let me stay with them in the interim. It ended up being one of the best New Years Eves of my life.

My very first play in Chicago was a political improv play—and really the less said about it, the better, however—there was one man in the play who thought he was smarter than the rest of us. He wanted above all things to “win” the improv. If this meant throwing a wrench in the narrative that the rest of us then had to work around, he would do it. The director tried to curtail this a few ways and eventually forced him to actually say the words, “yes, and” before anything else that came out of his mouth.

It didn’t work.

He just said things like, “Yes. AND you must be crazy.” This was a long time ago and many of the details surrounding our individual performances are thankfully rather fuzzy, but one thing I will never forget is the look of glee in David’s eye when he was about to say something that would ensure the rest of us “lost.” Often he would actually grin while he said it, whether it was in character or not. Unsurprisingly, the play wasn’t popular. The only good thing that came out of it was that a few members of the cast bonded around their hatred of David. He didn’t make any friends at all.

I have run into this many times, and I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that there are some people who get their kicks out of creating discord and hurt. The presence of internet trolls is hard evidence that these people are not small in number. The amount of harm they cause varies. It can be as small as tagging you in a one star review of a book you wrote just because they need you to see that THEY didn’t like YOUR thing. Maybe they know it will sting a little, maybe they don’t even consider your feelings at all and actually have the deluded belief that they’re helping you by imparting their wisdom. It can go as far as yelling slurs from windows. Grabbing a stranger’s ass. Committing actual hate crimes against people who are different from you. Et cetera, et cetera.

None of these things benefit anyone. The only benefit goes to the perpetrator, getting that rush they crave from harming someone else.

I went to a book festival this year. I ended up having a great time. But there were a lot of curveballs along the way. One of the reasons it went as well as it did was because of the other authors. Some of whom I had never even met. The author I was doing a presentation with in addition to the author I was traveling with both bent over backwards to boost our presentation when some unexpected obstacles came our way. Some authors we met there saw me frantically trying to clean up our table space while my table partner went for the car and just started helping without even asking. I tried to write a blog that week about how much I loved the support of this community but it wasn’t coming out right.

You can see every item of clothing I owned in my car. But I was having the best NYE ever, surrounded by friends who had lifted me up.

In then end, all I can say is that I think those of us who support each other and try to boost each other up are having a much better time dancing around together in our little lives than those who get temporary bursts of pleasure from knifing someone else.

I don’t do a lot of quoting other people to get my point across, but in this case, I don’t think I can say it any better than Kurt Vonnegut:

“There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."