kindness-crisis-kindness-crisis (dc al capo)

This is my new Indian printing block. It was supposed to be a reward I worked towards, for achieving something very specific, but it didn’t really work out like that. What I mean by that is I didn’t achieve this particular thing — in fact I achieved the exact opposite — but I got the printing block anyway. (I didn’t even have to stick my bottom lip out very far.)

Kind of like when I was in the E netball team (the very bottom of the sporting barrel) at intermediate and Tones said he’d take the whole team out for McDonalds if we won a game. Just one game. The season drew to a close and we’d suffered nothing but humiliating, bumbling, pleated-skirted/pasty-legged defeat. Tones took us all to McDonalds anyway, the whole butter-fingered, clutz-filled team of us. It’s a long time ago now, but we probably accepted our Happy Meals with a certain embarrassed grace, slumped wordlessly over our plastic trays, relieved we’d finally been put out to pasture until the next season.

I hated Saturday morning netball with more violent emotion than I could ever possibly convey here. But I turned up, all clutz and goosebumped bluster. Sort of a metaphor for life (although I’m far more fond of life than I am of netball). Because there was nothing else for it. It’s not like you have the option of boycotting at the age of 11. (Or if I did, I was far too sweet and unstaunch to even consider it.)

Anyway. That’s totally beyond the point. But while we’re beyond the point… Sometimes I get random emails from people at work saying things like do you want to join our social netball team? Or even who’s up for a run at lunchtime? At first I sent replies back saying things like get fucked; do you even know who I am? and I would rather cut my legs off at the knees than join your team/run up Mt Vic and then haul my sorry ass into an afternoon meeting and have to make like I don’t need urgent medical attention. Now I just hit delete. I figure my silence speaks volumes.

For a while I thought I might be good at pub quizzes, given my sporting deficiencies. It turns out I’m not good at those either (unless the topic is something like 21st Century Art in NZ, which it pretty much never is). But at least I am slightly canny where pub quizzes are concerned and know how to gather an infallible team of subject matter experts around me so I can still pretend to kick ass.

But back to Indian printing blocks. I returned home, tipped as much ink as I could find into Tupperware, got some stamping action happening, and came up with this:

It’s a bit of a fail. I think I might need to download an Indian stamp manual.

It has been a funny weekend. Funny good and funny unexpected. In a way. I thought a lot about kindness, and how you have to be in the right frame of mind to give and receive it. Or even just to notice it. Or to notice anything. Like the earnest young checkout boy at the supermarket who engages you in a lengthy conversation about Dorritos and then tells you to enjoy your day with more feeling than you have mustered for anything – big or small – lately.

At the very end of my Friday I received the most touching message I have received in a long time, from one of the most beautiful and loved people in my whole world. To me, it came out of nowhere and cut through everything. It knocked me for six. I went home in the rain in a dreamy spin, on the brink of happy weepiness. (And then proceeded to drink cocktails and eat Japanese salmon delicacies well into the early hours of Saturday morning.)

It’s good to be surprised. And loved. And kind.