"hopeful and something"

Yesterday, forgetting it was Veterans Day and the post office is closed, I bused downtown to mail a thank-you package to The Finnish Friend, for all her incredibly helpful and amusing insights into Finland.

I stopped at Candy Land to get some treats to top it off. I set the camera on self-timer and placed it on a newspaper box. Of course this never works the first time, and as I took multiple photos, two different people came up and offered to snap my photo for me. I turned them down because I was fulfilling the rule for 365 self-portraits: other people can't take the photo. But each person seemed a little disappointed, and I wish I had accepted their sweet offers of help.
[If I ever need a reminder that humans fundamentally want to help each other (if we're not afraid, or competing for resources, or...) I'm going to go downtown and do this again.]

Downtown anyway, I popped over to the Government Plaza light-rail stop to look more closely at Keith Christensen's installation there. (I mentioned a few posts back that I'd run into Keith for the first time in a dozen years.) He'd asked people how they saw democracy and used their answers as text. My almost-favorite is this one, below: "messy process". But my top-favorite answer was "hopeful and something".

I was feeling more "and something" yesterday because despite how nice several strangers were to me--(for instance, a construction worker, without me asking, helped me navigate the maze of fences at gov't plaza)--I was in an foul mood about human stupidity because it was Armistice Day (11/11) and here my country is, ninety-one years later, still at war.
But it was a gorgeous day, so I took off my shoes and socks to photograph my toes on the platform, and the yellow paint was warm. Lovely and cheering.
I stopped at the downtown library on the way home to get some books for my geography work. I also checked out the first season DVD of The Royle Family, a Britcom I'd never seen.I watched it last night and it was perfect---about a foul family that is, at heart, fundamentally decent. Much like all of us messy humans, it's "hopeful and something."