In praise of simple and earnest little joys

Now I’m not going to post a photo or anything, but let me tell you about my personal style. Haircut and wardrobe and whatnot. I can summarize it easily. If you saw me, you’d think, “Look at this Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood motherfucker.”

Beige is, unironically, one of my favourite colours.

This isn’t an intentional choice I’ve made for myself, but I’m old enough now to realize, comfortably, that it’s who I am.

I guess maybe it used to bother me. I remember, the only time I ever went to a therapist, he asked me, “Is it really such a bad thing to be boring?”

See, therapy isn’t necessarily a waste of time.

And look at the name of this publication. Calm. It’s what I seek, and also what I strive to exude.

Increasingly, it’s also what I’m responding to in the media I consume. This is sometimes a hard thing to explain to friends of mine, because “stories where nothing shocking or explosive happens but the characters maybe learn about their feelings along the way” isn’t a genre with a rabid fanbase.

I think there’s an artistry to depicting the mundane and the merely pleasant. I like small and quiet observations. I like conversations between characters about inconsequential elements of their daily lives. There doesn’t need to be sexual tension, or an explosion, or multiverse-spanning implications.

In other words: You on that triple bacon cheeseburger, I’m on that plain saltine cracker.

Here are some recent examples of what I’m trying to talk to you about:

There’s a new podcast called Stories from the Village of Nothing Much.

It’s a series of short stories that explore simple joys in life, like gathering with family for a holiday meal, or walking through a farmer’s market with a cup of hot cocoa. There’s no conflict, and therefore no resolution, in any of these stories. And yet at the end of each of them, I sigh like a satiated librarian, smile unconsciously, and sometimes even struggle to keep myself from weeping.

It’s hard to find this kind of simpleminded purity of positive feeling elsewhere.

Or let’s look at a manga example.

The bestselling manga in Japan last year was Blue Lock, which is basically, what if Squid Game but it’s to find the best soccer striker. This probably says something about the psyche of a nation in crisis, but that’s not what Calm is about (today).

On the other hand, the manga that topped the annual year-end Kono Manga ga Sugoi! (This Manga is Awesome) list was a very different sports manga: a heartfelt and naïve baseball story called Diamond no Kouzai.

I hadn’t read either of these series before, so I brought the first volume of both with me on holiday to Canada, where I spent the last two weeks of 2023.

While I found Blue Lock to be the better illustrated of the two, I found its over-the-top use of violence and cutthroat competitiveness to be exhausting. I can certainly see why it’s popular. But it’s not for me.

Diamond has not been popular, but it’s about to get a huge sales boost by topping the Sugoi list, which is chosen by booksellers in an effort to expose the public to the manga that they really ought to be reading.

Diamond, however, definitely is for me. It’s about a boy who’s so good at sports that he pretends not to be good, so that he doesn’t make the less-good kids feel bad about themselves. He’s got wicked-crazy good command over his pitching, and gets selected to Japan’s national baseball squad.

But what I love about it is the earnestness and the wide-eyed innocence of its young characters. Especially Jiro, the protagonist. He’s not motivated to play baseball because he wants to compete and be the best. Rather, he just wants to find a group of kids he can chill with, and have fun, without fear of judgment or hurting anyone’s feelings.

This gentleness of spirit is such a subversion of manga tropes, and I love it. I love that Diamond is going to become a bestseller, because I think it deserves to be. I can’t wait to read more, and I hope it retains that bigheartedness as the series goes on and gets more eyeballs on it. It’s only a matter of time before it’s adapted into an anime, or a live-action movie. You heard it here first.

Finally, let me tell you about the movies I watched on the two twelve-hour plane rides I recently took.

Traditionally, I only really watch movies on planes. My reasons for that are my own.

This time, I watched eight different movies, including some blockbusters (I can’t believe how much I enjoyed Barbie) and some works by Important Directors (Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City is the evil, bizarro incarnation of what I’m trying to describe in this article, and Jordan Peele’s Nope wasn’t everything I’d hoped it would be).

But the one I keep thinking about is I Like Movies.

As you can see from the trailer, it’s an extremely Canadian, no-budget film about an awkward 17-year-old who likes movies and… not much else. I had never heard about it before seeing it in the list of shit to watch on that plane.

It’s the kind of movie I didn’t think was being made anymore. But that’s because I, like too many people, really only think about American movies when I think I’m thinking about movies, writ large.

It’s not overly dramatic, and it’s not so cleverly written that it feels written. It also happens to take place at around the same point in history when I was an awkward 17-year-old, growing up in a similarly nondescript Ontario suburb.

Watching I Like Movies was the cinematic equivalent of digging out that stack of printed photos I took in the last year of high school, before smartphones made the value of each individual photo taken plummet through the crust of the earth.

Back then, the act of taking a photo was still kind of risky, and novel. Getting photos developed was a kind of very low-stakes lottery. Looking at each one for the first time was a drab little epiphany. Look! Here’s someone I know, doing something unremarkable! I will treasure this always.

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Look, we’re only four days into 2024, but so far I’ve risen before the sun on each of these days, feeling serene and hopeful, like I’ve got some semblance of control over my little tiny corner of the universe.

That’s new for me. And I prefer it to the terror and the certainty that something’s wrong—the feelings which I’ve come to expect from the moment I wake up every morning.

I think that both this deeper understanding of the stories that really resonate with me, and then intentionally exposing myself to those stories, and allowing myself to love them without shame, have shifted my mindset a little.

Of course, all that weed I smoked while I was in Canada at the end of 2023 wasn’t nothing. More on that soon, maybe.