I was just minding my own business.
While most people are young, they have little grasp of the world outside of their own perspective. Naturally narrow-minded, they only acknowledge events that they are directly or indirectly related or connected to; everything else may as well not exist. Sometimes, it seems that it is unfathomable to a child -- sometimes even an adult -- to comprehend a world, or even a universe of events outside that which they're involved in. This may be why most children have no interest in the news, and many of those who do have little understanding for what they're taking in.
I was one of these children.
I was all of sixteen. I as of yet had no taste for world events and was fairly apathetic to the world around me that didn't directly affect me. Possibly, rather than a lack of comprehension, my detached and cavalier attitude toward the world was more self-centered; I was naive enough to believe that whatever happened around me that didn't seem to immediately affect me didn't affect me at all. Hence, a phone call such as the one I was about to receive was quite daunting -- enough to remain with me for years, etched within the corridors of my mind for later introspective review.
***
The phone rings.
I got up, annoyed. See, I had little peace of mind during my childhood and adolescence. The house was devoid of inhabitants save for myself; I had no one to harass me with some impositions of responsibility or the defamation of my character. For the first time in a long while, I was all to myself to enjoy the listlessness of rare solitude.
But despite my personal feelings on the issue, I decided to answer the phone. My preferred course of action would usually be allowing the answering machine to take a message (as it was inevitably for anyone but me) and indolently stare at the television --
...but this time, I answered. I was metaphysically compelled, maybe. To be honest, it's circumstances like this that make it hard to, as per my cynical and realistic mentality, be atheistic or even agnostic. Logically speaking, there was no reason why I answered that phone at all.
She speaks frantically.
She was, whoever she was, pleading to speak to my step-cousin's (fiancee? wife?) at the time. She was a little too distant a relative for me to allow her, panicking as she was, to intrigue me, so I indifferently informed her that Robyn wasn't home and hung up the phone.
Fifteen minutes pass and the phone rings again.
I hesitantly answer the phone. Intuition?
Of course, it was she again, pleading for Robyn with even more exigency in her voice. I asked her if she was all right. She begged me to get in touch with Robyn and said that it was terribly important that she speak to her. In so many words.
I say that I had no way of contacting her and she hangs up.
Ten more minutes and the phone rings again. I answer it in the middle of the first ring.
"Hello??"
"May I please speak to Robyn."
"Who is this?!"
"This is her cousin. I need to speak to her. Please. It's an emergency."
"I've gathered. What's the problem? Maybe I can help? Call someone else? If you tell me what's wrong, then maybe I can find someone else who can help..."
"I... I need to speak to Robyn."
"Uh... b-but she isn't here. No one is. Everyone is out for the evening. I mean... I mean, what's wrong though?"
The soundtrack plays silence, the cacophony of terror. What could possibly be wrong?
Then finally: "I just swallowed twenty sleeping pills."
"Huh? WHAT?!"
"I just swallowed twenty sleeping pills! I'm gonna die!!!"
"Oh my God... what the... what the FUCK?!"
"I'm pregnant... I’m gonna die..."
"OH my GOD, you're... pregnant?! What the hell kind of phone call is this?!”
"I'm gonna die..." She begins to sob.
"Holy fucking... WHY?!"
"I can't... I can't..."
But she does. She begins to ramble on about issues concerning the father of the baby, monetary problems, familial problems, et. al. I wasn't listening. I didn't care. If I didn't do something, two people were going to die.
"Uh... how long ago did you take the pills?" I had cut her off in mid-sentence – she stopped speaking and fell silent..
"A... a little while ago. Right before I called the first time."
"Oh my -- THAT'S LIKE, HALF AN HOUR AGO!!!!"
"I know."
My mind was revving in at least thirteen-hundred rpm's. How long does it take to digest pills?!
"Oh my God, you've got to make yourself vomit."
"Huh?"
"You've got to make yourself vomit!!"
"I'm gonna die..." I noticed here that her voice was alternating between a shrill of hysteria and a quivering moan.
"NO! There is nothing, absolutely nothing so bad that you would have to kill your own child... how do you know what's going to happen in the next five minutes?! You may, by then, have no problems at all!"
"No... I can't..."
"Look, I don't know how you feel about yourself. If this were all about you, this'd be an entirely different issue, but this concerns you and your child's life. You have a reason to live, and that's for your baby, right?! You have a reason to stop this shit, and that's for your baby!! Can't you see how selfish you're being?! You're going to kill two people just because you think life is too hard! Life is never so hard that you'd have to kill someone who's never done a thing to you. Ever."
"I... I already took the pills."
"Vomit. Go in the bathroom and vomit."
"I can't."
"You have to. You can't just kill this child. Trust me, God helps those who..." I stopped for a moment. Then I continued: "...God helps those who help themselves. And God loves the children."
She, then we chuckled.
"I..."
"Go vomit. I'm not gonna let you go until you go vomit. I'm serious! Don't think I can't make you! I'll call your local police department right now. Wait -- where are you?!"
She doesn't say anything.
"Well, I know you're somewhere in New Orleans, that's where Robyn's from," I say indignantly.
"I'm gonna die."
"Uh… um…"
"Fine."
"Fine?! REALLY?! ALRIGHT!!!! Alright, go vomit."
"Alright."
"EXCELLENT. Alright, I'll wait here. I wanna hear you vomit. Just to make sure."
"I'll call you back."
"NO! Well..." I sigh. "Well, alright."
"Okay."
"You better call back."
She's silent.
"I'm not playing!"
"Bye." She hangs up.
I sit, blind and deaf to the television, phone in shaky hand.
I was nervous as hell. What if she lied? Who is she? What's going on?! What if she was just trying to get rid of me? What if she's just laying down to die?! Don't fall asleep! DON'T GO TO SLEEP!
The phone rings.
Two tones into the first ring, the receiver is to my ear, call connected.
"Did you vomit?!"
"Yes."
"YES!!!!"
My parents and my cousin with his (fiancee? wife?) Robyn walk in. I speedily explain what was going on as Robyn took the phone.
"I got it," she said.
I never got her name or a thank you.
***
My retrospective on that incident is asunder -- did I actually convince a stranger to vomit up mostly-digested sleeping pills and save her and her baby's life, or did some woman get on the phone and melodramatically play a needy role just effectively enough to provoke an apathetically naive sixteen year old mentally exhausted from television’s harmful rays? Perhaps I didn't accomplish a damned thing and it was as bad as it sounded: a pregnant young woman called the wrong place at the wrong time and she and her unborn kid ended up dying. Or she had a miscarriage. In fact, I'm almost certain that a fiasco like that would result in a miscarriage. I can only speculate. None of it is a very pretty hue, though.
But the high was extraordinary.
No matter what I’ve gotten myself involved in, the particular endorphins that my body decides to release while I'm being selfless or philanthropic tend to feel the best. Furthermore, it assists in the justification of serendipity. For whatever reason, humanity has a habit of contending its own happiness due to some innate guilt.
With this in mind as I grew older, I developed a personal take on Karma. Krishna and Buddhists believe that Karma is a preparation for reincarnation; how you behave in this life determines what happens in your next, and may even influence what you reincarnate as. I conversely don't believe that if I'm an asshole throughout this life, I'm going to reincarnate as the anus of some random animal. I believe, as a realist and a Christian, that how I behave and what I do affects me in this life -- a sophisticated take on the expression "what comes around goes around." To further elucidate, believe that how we dress our souls reflects itself through our appearance, efficacy, and fortuity. Hence, I have developed the philosophy of "Selfish Philanthropy": as a Selfish Philanthropist, I seek to positively affect the lives of people around me not directly related to my own in hopes that it will positively reflect itself upon my life. The fact that it's a hope and not an expectation keeps it philanthropy, but since I still hope to benefit from it, I admit to it being selfish in nature.
For example.
Once upon a time, I was searching for a job in New York City. I was in the middle of the business district in Brooklyn, where my mother had dropped me off on her way to work. It was an arduous journey to New York from where we lived in New Jersey, what with my mother's constant berating and the necessity of it having to be at five in the morning.
All by myself, I was sentenced to roaming the streets as if I were a lost immigrant searching for any establishment that was willing to pay me for something.
I was freezing. Ostensibly that day was especially cold and I was running out of money. I had just bought some gloves from a street vendor and only had enough money left to eat once that day. As I walked down a side street putting on my gloves, a very cold-looking man grunted for my attention from my left.
I stopped walking and looked at him through the puffs of breath I emitted.
He began to speak. He wasn't insane or senile – he didn't even seem particularly bitter... well, not any more so than what would be naturally expected from someone who didn't look like they had eaten or been inside during a northeastern winter anytime recently.
He seemed to only want conversation. So I conversed.
We talked about this impossible woman he was involved with at some point in his life, his mother, and how he was dying for a new pair of pants. He was a textbook homeless man – complete with ramblings indicative of severe loneliness and a shopping cart filled to the brim with absolutely nothing of value. Finally, he seemed sated with the dialogue after who-knows-how-long of living on the street surrounded by thousands of people with no one to speak to.
And I was impressed.
Never, not once, did he ask anything of me. Not for a coat, not for a penny, not for a crumb. We simply had an interesting conversation. So before leaving, I threw at him: "Hey... ya hungry?"
With seemingly considerable effort, he lifted himself from his perch and approached the railing that was separating him from the sidewalk and I (as he was encamped within an inlet before the side door of a large, probably abandoned building with a concrete platform before him) and matter-of-factly responded, "Yes."
"Don't go anywhere." I sprint and cut a sharp right at the corner. Four blocks later, I'm in the nearest McDonalds, ordering the most expensive thing I can find on the menu, complete with a hot coffee. Once served, I sprint all the way back, in fear that the man might disappear.
Upon return, I find him perched back on whatever he was sitting on. He probably thought I had forgotten about him or was full of shit. I placed the bag full of food and steaming hot coffee at the edge of the platform, bid him farewell and God bless, and walked away. In one of the parked cars to my right, I could have sworn I saw someone sitting in the passenger's seat grinning at me.
I have never had the slightest problem getting a job since.
~ P.
While most people are young, they have little grasp of the world outside of their own perspective. Naturally narrow-minded, they only acknowledge events that they are directly or indirectly related or connected to; everything else may as well not exist. Sometimes, it seems that it is unfathomable to a child -- sometimes even an adult -- to comprehend a world, or even a universe of events outside that which they're involved in. This may be why most children have no interest in the news, and many of those who do have little understanding for what they're taking in.
I was one of these children.
I was all of sixteen. I as of yet had no taste for world events and was fairly apathetic to the world around me that didn't directly affect me. Possibly, rather than a lack of comprehension, my detached and cavalier attitude toward the world was more self-centered; I was naive enough to believe that whatever happened around me that didn't seem to immediately affect me didn't affect me at all. Hence, a phone call such as the one I was about to receive was quite daunting -- enough to remain with me for years, etched within the corridors of my mind for later introspective review.
***
The phone rings.
I got up, annoyed. See, I had little peace of mind during my childhood and adolescence. The house was devoid of inhabitants save for myself; I had no one to harass me with some impositions of responsibility or the defamation of my character. For the first time in a long while, I was all to myself to enjoy the listlessness of rare solitude.
But despite my personal feelings on the issue, I decided to answer the phone. My preferred course of action would usually be allowing the answering machine to take a message (as it was inevitably for anyone but me) and indolently stare at the television --
...but this time, I answered. I was metaphysically compelled, maybe. To be honest, it's circumstances like this that make it hard to, as per my cynical and realistic mentality, be atheistic or even agnostic. Logically speaking, there was no reason why I answered that phone at all.
She speaks frantically.
She was, whoever she was, pleading to speak to my step-cousin's (fiancee? wife?) at the time. She was a little too distant a relative for me to allow her, panicking as she was, to intrigue me, so I indifferently informed her that Robyn wasn't home and hung up the phone.
Fifteen minutes pass and the phone rings again.
I hesitantly answer the phone. Intuition?
Of course, it was she again, pleading for Robyn with even more exigency in her voice. I asked her if she was all right. She begged me to get in touch with Robyn and said that it was terribly important that she speak to her. In so many words.
I say that I had no way of contacting her and she hangs up.
Ten more minutes and the phone rings again. I answer it in the middle of the first ring.
"Hello??"
"May I please speak to Robyn."
"Who is this?!"
"This is her cousin. I need to speak to her. Please. It's an emergency."
"I've gathered. What's the problem? Maybe I can help? Call someone else? If you tell me what's wrong, then maybe I can find someone else who can help..."
"I... I need to speak to Robyn."
"Uh... b-but she isn't here. No one is. Everyone is out for the evening. I mean... I mean, what's wrong though?"
The soundtrack plays silence, the cacophony of terror. What could possibly be wrong?
Then finally: "I just swallowed twenty sleeping pills."
"Huh? WHAT?!"
"I just swallowed twenty sleeping pills! I'm gonna die!!!"
"Oh my God... what the... what the FUCK?!"
"I'm pregnant... I’m gonna die..."
"OH my GOD, you're... pregnant?! What the hell kind of phone call is this?!”
"I'm gonna die..." She begins to sob.
"Holy fucking... WHY?!"
"I can't... I can't..."
But she does. She begins to ramble on about issues concerning the father of the baby, monetary problems, familial problems, et. al. I wasn't listening. I didn't care. If I didn't do something, two people were going to die.
"Uh... how long ago did you take the pills?" I had cut her off in mid-sentence – she stopped speaking and fell silent..
"A... a little while ago. Right before I called the first time."
"Oh my -- THAT'S LIKE, HALF AN HOUR AGO!!!!"
"I know."
My mind was revving in at least thirteen-hundred rpm's. How long does it take to digest pills?!
"Oh my God, you've got to make yourself vomit."
"Huh?"
"You've got to make yourself vomit!!"
"I'm gonna die..." I noticed here that her voice was alternating between a shrill of hysteria and a quivering moan.
"NO! There is nothing, absolutely nothing so bad that you would have to kill your own child... how do you know what's going to happen in the next five minutes?! You may, by then, have no problems at all!"
"No... I can't..."
"Look, I don't know how you feel about yourself. If this were all about you, this'd be an entirely different issue, but this concerns you and your child's life. You have a reason to live, and that's for your baby, right?! You have a reason to stop this shit, and that's for your baby!! Can't you see how selfish you're being?! You're going to kill two people just because you think life is too hard! Life is never so hard that you'd have to kill someone who's never done a thing to you. Ever."
"I... I already took the pills."
"Vomit. Go in the bathroom and vomit."
"I can't."
"You have to. You can't just kill this child. Trust me, God helps those who..." I stopped for a moment. Then I continued: "...God helps those who help themselves. And God loves the children."
She, then we chuckled.
"I..."
"Go vomit. I'm not gonna let you go until you go vomit. I'm serious! Don't think I can't make you! I'll call your local police department right now. Wait -- where are you?!"
She doesn't say anything.
"Well, I know you're somewhere in New Orleans, that's where Robyn's from," I say indignantly.
"I'm gonna die."
"Uh… um…"
"Fine."
"Fine?! REALLY?! ALRIGHT!!!! Alright, go vomit."
"Alright."
"EXCELLENT. Alright, I'll wait here. I wanna hear you vomit. Just to make sure."
"I'll call you back."
"NO! Well..." I sigh. "Well, alright."
"Okay."
"You better call back."
She's silent.
"I'm not playing!"
"Bye." She hangs up.
I sit, blind and deaf to the television, phone in shaky hand.
I was nervous as hell. What if she lied? Who is she? What's going on?! What if she was just trying to get rid of me? What if she's just laying down to die?! Don't fall asleep! DON'T GO TO SLEEP!
The phone rings.
Two tones into the first ring, the receiver is to my ear, call connected.
"Did you vomit?!"
"Yes."
"YES!!!!"
My parents and my cousin with his (fiancee? wife?) Robyn walk in. I speedily explain what was going on as Robyn took the phone.
"I got it," she said.
I never got her name or a thank you.
***
My retrospective on that incident is asunder -- did I actually convince a stranger to vomit up mostly-digested sleeping pills and save her and her baby's life, or did some woman get on the phone and melodramatically play a needy role just effectively enough to provoke an apathetically naive sixteen year old mentally exhausted from television’s harmful rays? Perhaps I didn't accomplish a damned thing and it was as bad as it sounded: a pregnant young woman called the wrong place at the wrong time and she and her unborn kid ended up dying. Or she had a miscarriage. In fact, I'm almost certain that a fiasco like that would result in a miscarriage. I can only speculate. None of it is a very pretty hue, though.
But the high was extraordinary.
No matter what I’ve gotten myself involved in, the particular endorphins that my body decides to release while I'm being selfless or philanthropic tend to feel the best. Furthermore, it assists in the justification of serendipity. For whatever reason, humanity has a habit of contending its own happiness due to some innate guilt.
With this in mind as I grew older, I developed a personal take on Karma. Krishna and Buddhists believe that Karma is a preparation for reincarnation; how you behave in this life determines what happens in your next, and may even influence what you reincarnate as. I conversely don't believe that if I'm an asshole throughout this life, I'm going to reincarnate as the anus of some random animal. I believe, as a realist and a Christian, that how I behave and what I do affects me in this life -- a sophisticated take on the expression "what comes around goes around." To further elucidate, believe that how we dress our souls reflects itself through our appearance, efficacy, and fortuity. Hence, I have developed the philosophy of "Selfish Philanthropy": as a Selfish Philanthropist, I seek to positively affect the lives of people around me not directly related to my own in hopes that it will positively reflect itself upon my life. The fact that it's a hope and not an expectation keeps it philanthropy, but since I still hope to benefit from it, I admit to it being selfish in nature.
For example.
Once upon a time, I was searching for a job in New York City. I was in the middle of the business district in Brooklyn, where my mother had dropped me off on her way to work. It was an arduous journey to New York from where we lived in New Jersey, what with my mother's constant berating and the necessity of it having to be at five in the morning.
All by myself, I was sentenced to roaming the streets as if I were a lost immigrant searching for any establishment that was willing to pay me for something.
I was freezing. Ostensibly that day was especially cold and I was running out of money. I had just bought some gloves from a street vendor and only had enough money left to eat once that day. As I walked down a side street putting on my gloves, a very cold-looking man grunted for my attention from my left.
I stopped walking and looked at him through the puffs of breath I emitted.
He began to speak. He wasn't insane or senile – he didn't even seem particularly bitter... well, not any more so than what would be naturally expected from someone who didn't look like they had eaten or been inside during a northeastern winter anytime recently.
He seemed to only want conversation. So I conversed.
We talked about this impossible woman he was involved with at some point in his life, his mother, and how he was dying for a new pair of pants. He was a textbook homeless man – complete with ramblings indicative of severe loneliness and a shopping cart filled to the brim with absolutely nothing of value. Finally, he seemed sated with the dialogue after who-knows-how-long of living on the street surrounded by thousands of people with no one to speak to.
And I was impressed.
Never, not once, did he ask anything of me. Not for a coat, not for a penny, not for a crumb. We simply had an interesting conversation. So before leaving, I threw at him: "Hey... ya hungry?"
With seemingly considerable effort, he lifted himself from his perch and approached the railing that was separating him from the sidewalk and I (as he was encamped within an inlet before the side door of a large, probably abandoned building with a concrete platform before him) and matter-of-factly responded, "Yes."
"Don't go anywhere." I sprint and cut a sharp right at the corner. Four blocks later, I'm in the nearest McDonalds, ordering the most expensive thing I can find on the menu, complete with a hot coffee. Once served, I sprint all the way back, in fear that the man might disappear.
Upon return, I find him perched back on whatever he was sitting on. He probably thought I had forgotten about him or was full of shit. I placed the bag full of food and steaming hot coffee at the edge of the platform, bid him farewell and God bless, and walked away. In one of the parked cars to my right, I could have sworn I saw someone sitting in the passenger's seat grinning at me.
I have never had the slightest problem getting a job since.
~ P.
