An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

by Hank Green

You’re not fooling anyone. You’re a digital girl, April, in a digital world. We all know how to perform.” God bless Andy for being blunt.

Being annoyed by carefully crafted internet personas was part of my carefully crafted internet persona.

fine art is like art that exists for its own sake. The thing that fine art does is itself. Design is art that does something else. It’s more like visual engineering. I started school focusing on fine art, but I decided by the end of the first semester that maybe I wanted to someday have a job.

The whole time I was in front of the camera, I was thinking of the artist. A fellow creator who had poured her soul into something truly remarkable that might simply be ignored by the whole world.

Much of the best art is about balancing between reflecting culture while simultaneously being removed from it and commenting on it.

“Would you rather be the first person to reveal that there is a mystery? Or the person who solves the mystery?” Maya continued to appeal to my newfound sense of self-importance to get me to do what she wanted. I noticed.

“When you’re faced with something you don’t understand, I think the most natural thing but also the least interesting thing you can be is afraid,”

Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average. Power

You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.

“Carl just had too much mass—we couldn’t stop falling into his gravity any more than we could jump to the moon.”

Basically, do your best to mock and deride their connection to and appreciation of you because, deep down, you dislike yourself enough that you cannot imagine anyone worthwhile actually wanting to be with you. I mean, if they like you, there must be something wrong with them, right?

But our relationship was mostly held together by Maya’s understanding that my ridicule of her feelings for me was a manifestation of my distaste for myself, not her.

In the end, my brand was me, so whatever I said became something I believed.

“You have to define a timeline and you have to decide what you want to get across. What are your goals with the book? What do you want everyone to think when they finish it? Do you want them to understand you? Do you want them to understand your story?”

What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real.

Did you spot it? A friend of mine once told me that, no matter how much you proofread, the first time you open the final version of your book, you will find a typo on the very first page you look at.

You’d think I’d peacefully cuddle into my fancy hotel bed and drop off to a delicious sleep, but no. This is what rock stars feel like after their concerts . . . This is why they have after-parties with groupies and cocaine. You want to keep the high going, but you can’t rock forever, I guess.

I felt very strongly that the Carls were a globally unifying force. For the first time ever, humanity was literally sharing a dream. It felt more like we were sharing a planet than ever before, and to me that felt like a gift given to us by the Carls.

But addiction isn’t necessarily about the specific thing; it’s about mental reliance, it’s a bug in your brain software, and even with the support of some truly remarkable people working to keep me in line, I never went cold turkey. Even after the apps were off my phone, I would go to twitter.com using its browser.