Incredible Hulk Balls: Thoughts on Perspective

One day I found myself fighting with a moose. Well, we weren’t actually fighting, and he wasn’t really a moose. I was trolling a local DJ on Facebook, and I’m not sure “trolling” is the right word either. Nonetheless, the Moose and I were in some sort of online skirmish about a cry closet. Yes, a cry closet.  After some radio banter highlighting the moronic audaciousness of the closet, Moose DJ posted a “What’s Trending” video about it on Facebook. The Moose hated the closet! The video he posted summarizes the controversy concerning a University of Utah art student’s installation of a tiny, free-standing closet in the library during finals week. The slightly-smaller-than-a-porta-potty structure could hold a single occupant and a few stuffed animals---picture a large upright casket but one for dying scholarly dreams and teddy bears. Directions on the vault of tears stated that students studying for finals should “use the closet for a 10-minute break”---I assume one might resort to a cry closet break when chugging  Mountain Dew, dumping M&Ms into jars of peanut butter, assuming the fetal position under a bookshelf, sucking liquid cocaine drinks through a straw, or staring at MTV for hours could not relieve the stress---not that I’m familiar with such college-era tactics. 

I’m going to be honest, my instinctive reaction to the cry closet  wasn’t positive. I had certainly bemoaned college-kid coddling in the past---what university instructor hasn’t?  I definitely debated the need for puppy petting during finals week. That’s a real thing. I’ll never forget the day I went for a coffee and saw the fat furballs waddling around in the student center. My silver- dollar-sized eyes slowly scanned the surreal environment filled with students cuddling pooches, vibrating in massage chairs, and snorting air at an oxygen bar. I thought, what did that heavily pierced barista put in my Chai latte, and what is this over-indulgent comfort dome? For goodness sakes, back in the day, poor shoeless me had to outrun herds of rabid mad cows in raging blizzards just to get to school. (Well, I rode the bus, but there were still foaming-at-the-mouth bullies and mad drivers---the postman in the movie Funny Farm comes to mind but that representation is not quite accurate.) 

Coming from a farming family, the idea of “pulling up your bootstraps and getting to work” has been firmly rooted in my brain, so sometimes my impulse is to criticize complaints. That little voice in my head that sounds like my dad growls “buck up, buster!”  To this day, I feel extreme guilt if I take an afternoon nap. Yet, over the years, I have come to realize that the simple “be tough” bootstrap mantra isn’t so simple; self-care is incredibly important too. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re no good to anyone else. And scratching the fat belly of a puppy really does make things better. You can curmudgeon your way through tasks without gleefully squeezing some furry puppy fat---but why? As long as hard work still happens, it’s okay to delight in life. Even though I had evolved a little, that stalwart farmer work ethic still urged me to join the media feeding frenzy concerning the cry closet. 

I can never fully frenzy until I get all the facts, so I decided to track down more information before joining Moose DJ’s warcry calling for the shredded heads of the cry-closet teddy bears. Within 5 minutes of Google surfing, I discovered that the closet was an art installation, an art student’s final project. The University of Utah did not purchase the closet---it just allowed the installation to be displayed in the library. Displaying student art  is pretty standard practice in university libraries.  The box wasn’t a “real” stress reliever sanctioned by the U of U at all. It was a piece of art created to generate discussion and challenge the status quo.  One definition, according to Wikipedia (totally acceptable for pre-research research, by the way), is that an installation of art:

bestows an unprecedented importance on the observer's inclusion in that which he observes. The expectations and social habits that the viewer takes with him into the space of the installation will remain with him as he enters, to be either applied or negated once he has taken in the new environment. What is common to nearly all installation art is a consideration of the experience in total and the problems it may present, namely the constant conflict between disinterested criticism and sympathetic involvement.

Not only could I not frenzy, I had to contact that student’s professor to make sure she had received an A+. Her cry closet project was a slam-dunk success! Moose, me, and many others, with all of our expectations and biases, were simply part of the art experiment, as public interaction/reaction is a critical element of all art installations. The closet wasn’t there so students could hide in a little box, sob, and cuddle teddy bears--- it was there to generate discussions about student stress (real or imagined), self-care (accepted or mocked), higher education (valuable or ridiculous), gullibility and a million other things. In an interview, the artist Nemo Miller said, “I am interested in humanity and the inherent complexities of the human condition...One aspect of humanity that I am currently exploring is connections and missed connections through communication. It’s been interesting to watch the response to this piece about human emotions, and I’m proud to see the power of art in action.” We all fell for it hook, line, and sinker. And viral media was helping to highlight how people connect or disconnect from each other. 

My research was done, but my trolling (er, truth spreading?) was about to begin. I had to communicate with the Moose and share the facts. The frenzied feeders did not need to fear or loathe the plushie-stuffed sob box. I had to tell the people who had commented “Our country is in real trouble!” and “Kids can't take being yelled at anymore!” on Moose’s post that the closet would not destroy the USA, not today--not on my watch! 

So, um, hey Moose:

It’s an art installation—created by one student. The university did not put it up. The purpose of art installations is to challenge ideas, get people thinking—“get people going.” I think the student accomplished her mission! 

With the enter key click, I thought Yes! The world’s safe from the viral wave of cry closet misinformation! All can rest easy and smile. A few minutes later I saw Moose’s reply.

Moose:

I'm not sure if it's this school but one schools actually using it. And the real idea is ridiculous. It's called adulting 😂

Um, Wait. What? Is it real? Crap. Did I miss something? I googled and googled and found----nothing. I couldn’t find anything about “real” cry closets being utilized in any schools. As far as I could tell, there were no colleges promoting weeping and teddy bear fondling in small dark spaces. I checked the comments on the original video thinking that someone might have posted some more information. Clearly I had not learned my lesson about reading comments on the internet:

“I want someone to swing the door open and yell ILL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT! Worked for me as a kid. Lol”

“What the hell happened that such a pathetic and weak generation was allowed to survive this long? In the wild, they would have been abandoned and/or killed for the survival of the species and pack. But noooo..not us humans. We coddle the weak, hand out participation trophies, let generations of one family survive on welfare, and now we have cry rooms. Damn this is sad.”

“OMG, what are they doing to our kids? What happened to just going for a walk or the bathroom stall at school to take a minute for yourself! You butter cups better get a clue, life's not fair, it can be hard and you better buck up and get some self reliance, confidence in yourself. These colleges just aren't preparing you for the real world.”

“Sure... I thought they were fighting to come out of the closet and now society is trying to shove them back in!”

“This pod of shame should be connected to a carbon monoxide tank so weak minded millennials can be factored out of the gene pool. No, most people don't need this, you trite and worthless page.”

So, then I was horrified. But I decided to take a closer look at the major media publications concerning the closet. Maybe those would be more insightful. Some of the headlines were:

“‘Cry Closet’ in University Library for Students Stressed over Finals”--USA Today
“Let’s Embrace our Blubbering and Make Cry Closets Happen”--Slate
“University of Utah ‘Cry Closet’ Lets Students “Just Let it All Out” During Finals--CBSNews
“College Installs a ‘Cry Closet’ As Safe Space For Student Snowflakes”-- Fox News

As far as I could see, all the headlines were presenting the story inaccurately. So I began mindlessly clicking on video clips---diving even deeper into the madness of the cry closet. The first page and a half of Google results highlighted a Tucker Carlson segment: “Higher Education at Work: ‘Cry Closets’ for Snowflakes.” In the intro, Tucker briefly describes the closet and asks “Is it time to go national with this?”

I realized my response to the Moose would not be as monumental as previous thought.  No amount of trolling would make any difference at all---I would never stop the frenzy (funny how I keep having to relearn this.) The media---neutral, conservative, liberal---decided to run with the closet-of-emotional-indulgence narrative and my little comments were no match against the online goliath. I felt defeated---and I kind of felt like a lot of people wanted to storm universities and eliminate artists. The cry closet was a viral sensation pitting sides against each other, the snowflake coddlers versus the fully bucked-up bootstrap wearers. Everyone seemed to lockstep into the binary even though the controversy was born from blatant misinformation and the misframing of actual facts. My naive self was a little shocked--- no one seemed to care about the basic facts.  I guess it can be easier and more entertaining to quickly choose sides and react with emotion; at first, I was more than ready to frenzy. The art installation worked perfectly to expose some of our societal issues. In the end, this dismayed, sorry excuse for a troll had to wave her white flag, and the Moose won the skirmish that wasn’t really a skirmish at all---it was all just part of the experiment.     

Okay, so I guess you’ve been waiting to hear about the Incredible Hulk balls.

My son, like many kids, avoids vegetables at all costs. Asking him to eat a green bean is like asking him to suck snails out of a cow tank---although he’d probably try the latter. The “it’s a tree not broccoli and you’re a giant not a three year old,” trick only works so long, and I knew he couldn’t survive on chicken nuggets and meatballs alone, so I had to get creative. One night as I started mixing up another batch of meatball ingredients, I got a wild idea: why not add some pureed veggies---he’ll never know they’re in there! I grabbed a bag of frozen garden fare, microwaved it, and blended into a nice thin pulp. Turns out that mixed veggies (carrots, cauliflower, broccoli), when pulverized, look a little like Linda Blair’s stomach contents, aka green pea soup. Despite this slight hitch in my brilliant plan, I powered on, formed the balls and hoped the green would fade with frying. Nope---fully cooked, the meatballs still  looked like small, seriously ill Kermit heads. Sure it was a futile effort at this point, I put them on a plate and called my child to the table.  

As he took a seat, he skeptically eyed his plate, and I felt like the Downton Abbey cook watching the master about to sample her flamboyant take on pigeon pie. He stabbed a meatball with his fork and asked with a hint of contentiousness “what_are_these?” I didn’t answer, hung my head, held my breath and moved toward the freezer to grab the family-size chicken nugget bag. But seconds before I succumbed to defeat, I blurted out, “They’re hulk balls! You know, like the Incredible Hulk.” Mini Gordan Ramsay pursed his lips, looked at me, looked at the balls, nodded and said “huh, cool.” He then popped a veggie-infused meatball into his mouth and smiled. I spun away from the freezer and did a little victory dance behind his back. It worked! Not only did he eat one hulk ball, he ate them all! He hit his daily veggie dose and then some. However, I was so focused on my achievement that what I had actually done didn’t fully sink in until I was standing at the sink. As I scrubbed the meatball pan, my proud smile faded when I imagined him innocently telling all his little school friends, “last night I ate hulk balls!”  

I convinced my son to see the green balls as something more exciting and tolerable than veggie-infused ground beef. Even though I didn’t thoroughly think it through, I controlled the framing of his experience. I suppose this kind of perspective framing can be used for both good and evil. The tricky part is deciding which frames are good and which ones are evil. Perhaps the fault actually lies with that dualistic kind of thinking. The nature of viral media is all about playing to the extremes and making big statements in the least amount of space and time possible---exhibit A: moose fight. 

In our information overloaded world, we are most often just getting a skimming of it all---like scraping off the fetid top layer of old milk. Blindly accepting one frame, the rotten milk, can cause frenzied behavior and be destructive. The limited consumption of the top layer also perfectly suits our human inclination to perceive the world as “us” versus “other.” The art installation cleverly played on social biases and assumptions by relying on the idea that people wouldn’t check the facts or think beyond what was presented to them. Who has time to continuously track down all the facts in this world of skew? But it seems that the “truth” is buried under many layers of old and new perspectives.

So in simply drinking the fetid milk, are we choosing ignorance in order to comfortably sit on one side of the binary? How can this be avoided? I guess if I find that something is leading me down a path of anger, vilification of the other, and ultimately personal suffering, I need to make sure that I diligently work my way through the layers. Also, what happened to the value of imagination and delighting in the discovery of nuanced perspectives anyway?  Imagination is usually fun and enjoyable, ignorance, at least in the end, isn’t. Wouldn’t open discourse about the possible instead of  the limited be exponentially more beneficial? The cry closet and the hulk balls caused me  to consider all of these questions (that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write). I suppose, in a way, we are all just part of a grand experiment, but maybe we can we make this experiment less hurtful and destructive. I guess it could be helpful to take an occasional pause and ask oneself: am I being served veggie-infused meatballs or Incredible Hulk balls?