An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1)

by Hank Green

I’m going to attempt to come at this account honestly, but I’ll also admit to a significant pro-me bias.

“Look, guys,” he said, “it’s easy to make something cool look cool, that’s why everyone picks cool things. Ultimately, though, cool is always going to be boring. What if we can make something dumb look amazing? Something unmarketable, awesome? That’s a real challenge. That takes real skill. Let’s show real skill.”

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

Unlike most of my classmates who graduated with design degrees, I thought a lot about fine art. If you’re wondering what the difference is, well, 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.

I don’t really understand people who keep everything around them constantly neat. It’s way more efficient to do occasional dedicated cleanups than constant maintenance. Plus, my mind likes clutter. It’s almost like I need to make the world around me messy to make my art and ideas neat. Simplicity in design, complete disaster in everything else. It was an entire ethos I was working on.

The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and frightened and weak is amazing.

“Um . . . you are suddenly extremely popular. Andy would like to talk. He would like to talk a lot. He would like to talk for at least four years. Your parents also called.”

I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.

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

“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,” I say.

So here’s a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool.

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.

They tell you that power corrupts . . . They never tell you how quickly!

It was because I needed to make a decision. The kind of choice that you only get to make once and you can’t take back and it makes your life totally different, and even if the path is clear, it’s still deeply unsettling.

And so we did what we’d been taught to do in school: We built a brand. Branding is something designers think about a lot. You take something like a perfume or a car tire, or butt-flavored bubble gum, and you ask questions about it that you shouldn’t be able to ask. What kind of tuxedo would this car tire wear to the prom? What is this perfume’s favorite movie? You try to end up in a place where you understand a product as if it is a person.

But one thing that I didn’t anticipate was that, in creating the April May brand, I was very much creating a new me. You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.

“A materials scientist from UC Berkeley that I’ve been in correspondence with says that the properties of the Carls are impossible. Not weird or expensive or new, but according to everything we know, simply not possible.”

Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it.

It’s hard not to be immediately defensive when people challenge you on your sexuality no matter what it is. Some people just can’t seem to believe that I feel the way I do, and so suddenly they’re off explaining me to themselves with me sitting right there.

I’ve always loved the sounds of the city: honking, engines, jackhammers, raised voices. I wasn’t raised with it, but the first night I spent in a real city I knew I was going to love it. That clattering of humanity mixed in all its randomness was as relaxing to me as crickets chirping beside a rushing brook.

“It can’t be undone now, but in the future, if you are aware of an alien life-form, a message it has sent to the people of Earth, and are planning on taking actions based on that information, that would be a fantastic thing for the government of your country to be aware of before you take any such action. Indeed, if you have any other information, it would be appropriate to share it with me now.” She said “appropriate” in a way that made me think that she also meant “legally required.”

He was one of thousands of people who scraped by filtering reality through their ideology and then yelling really loudly at the internet.

Just because someone has power over you doesn’t mean they’re going to use it to hurt you. People who believe that tend to either be: People who have been victims of that sort of behavior, or . . . People who, if given power, will use it to hurt you.

I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time. “Oh, so, we don’t have to do anything. This problem will solve itself.” I saw frustration bloom on Maya’s face. “No, April, this problem will get solved by people who just happen to not be you.”

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

Reasoned, caring conversations that considered the complexity of other perspectives didn’t get views. Rants did. Outrage did. Simplicity did. So, simple, outraged rants is what I gave people.

Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.

There’s a moment when one extra thing just breaks the whole process. If only you didn’t have that thing, this would be a situation you could easily manage. Well, that’s the way my mind felt in that moment.

Humans are terrible at believing reality.

“On this truly terrible day the world mourns. In our mourning we have to remember that this was not done by an evil world or an evil species, it was done by a few individuals. Yes, the level of sophistication and organization is terrifying. Their goal is to be terrifying, and they have succeeded. I’m scared. Of course I am. But a few fools who killed themselves and others for some unfounded ideal that took hold in their broken hearts—I’m not afraid of them, I’m afraid of their fear.”

They both smiled at me like idiot puppies, and then my mom said, “April, you’re not building a brand, you’re building yourself.” Dad’s eyes were misty as he added, “It’s so easy to forget, with everything that’s happened this year, that you’re only twenty-three years old.”