Secret collecting, list of compliments, fortune cookie fortunes

Compliment lists

During the last week of senior year, my A.P. literature teacher told our class about an assignment that she had been giving for some time on the last day of class, one that she learned about from a teacher-friend, who had begun the tradition. The assignment was thus: our teacher distributed a list of the people in class to each student, and told us to come up with one compliment for every person. We were to email the lists with appended compliments to her, and she would compile them, so that each person in class had a relative ton of compliments next to his or her name. Then, on the last day she would print off a copy of every student's compliments and give it to that student to keep for as long as he or she wanted to keep it. For example, Tomas, a guy in my class, had 20-odd compliments on a piece of paper on that last day, one from every person in class, all of them different (if only slightly). The rationale behind the compliment-gathering-assignment was found in a story that she told us. Her teacher-friend, the one who had given her the idea, had started the practice in the seventies. One of her former students was drafted in the Vietnam War. He was killed there. His army friend found his body and went through the pockets. In one pocket he found a piece of folded, faded paper -- the sheet with all of his classmates' compliments. Eventually the soldier's mother found out about the compliment sheet and it made her happy to read all of the things that his classmates had written about him way back in high school.

It is a semi-cheesy story, and acquired third-hand. However that may be, I feel that it is a wonderful example of real vibrations and resonance. The mother had not known until her son died that he had participated in these interactions with his classmates; had not known that such a reserve of kindness and camaraderie had been expressed for him. It was a door opened onto some small world in which her son existed that she had not known about before. This is not necessarily something that I want to pursue directly or overtly in my term project, but I feel that it's a good example of the phenomenon that was discussed in class today about finding life and finding communion where you would not expect it.

Secret sharing

The other thing I want to write about is secret sharing (anonymous). According to someone named Jon, secrets are necessarily bad things, no matter what the actual secret concerns. For him, a secret is either a vague, free-floating wound of sorts, or unshared happiness; some bit of information that really should be attached to a person, in any case. My opinion is that secrets are vectors for communication between people even if the communication is incomplete. I'm interested in the ways that secrets shared anonymously can change the daily flow of life for individuals. How might one person's secret influence another? Are secrets political? Can secret sharing move one person out of a "zombie" phase into a fully (or at least progressively more) awakened state?

This idea is somewhat borrowed from the PostSecret enterprise, wherein anyone can fill out a postcard with a secret anonymously and send it to him, and he might publish the postcard in a book. My idea is to collect secrets from people, totally voluntarily and anonymously, and re-print them on the pages of my zine. Each secret would either be set off from the rest of the text with a special box or frame, or it wouldn't -- it would be inserted into the text in a less obvious, more subtle way. Then, when the zine is finished, I will print enough copies for everyone who submitted a secret so that they can read other people's secrets and react how they will. One important thing about this project is that it is not meant to embarrass or in any way hurt people who have submitted secrets. Secrets need not be "bad," "shameful" or what have you (they can be, though) -- they can just as well be light, funny, heartwarming, revelatory, or quotidian. The point is to communicate something that really needs to be communicated, shared. I want it to be an exercise in making something external that had previously been internal.

Fortune cookies

I don't have anything really to say about these except that they would be a neat visual addition to a zine.