There were hundreds and hundreds of impassioned people. Many of them in pink hats shaped like rabbit ears.

“A protest against rabbits?” I wondered. Probably not. Not very divisive as far as animals go. Unless all of these people are…gardeners?

But no. As I walked farther along I read signs with statements like, “My body, my business,” and “Women’s rights are human rights.”

Ohhhhh. A rally for common sense.

“Amazing,” I thought. “No wonder it’s almost all women here.”

I picked up an abandoned piece of floppy cardboard and wrote my own message in solemn solidarity.

“DO NOT WASH CHEESE GRATERS WITH A SPONGE.”

Adults, I’ve noticed, are always going up. Or down.

“Yeah, we went up this weekend. It wasn’t as cold as it was here,” I overheard a commuter say to his friend. “Are you going up?”

“No,” his friend replied, “we went down last week. Took forever with traffic.”

These places, Up and Down — I imagine must be amazing. I constantly wonder what they have there for adults: endless upward ski slopes and all the down dogs mothers could want. There has to be shopping uptown, and definitely some Downton Abbey. Adults have sex upwards of 3 times a weekend in Up, but never more because Up is a place and not a wizard. Downtime is rampant in Down, that’s why people can’t stand to be there any longer than a week. People are smart. There are newspapers. Everything is upbeat and upscale, there’s turn down service and it’s all downright delightful.

Everyone regularly visits the folks in Up or Down, so they check off all the boxes when they go. Adults bring the kids Up; they rarely bring the kids Down. In Up they look at the sky and mumble a lot of aimless questions; in Down they look at their feet and ask nothing at all. Up and Down are for relaxing. You try not to get bothered.

But — I’ve never been. I suppose I’m not old enough. I don’t have kids to take Up for the week, and I’m far from affording a weekend in Down. I’m only 22, for goodness sakes.

So for now I content myself with Sideways.

Now in Sideways, there’s a lot to do. Dangerous side cars, even more dangerous sidelong glances. There’s putting aside time for unpredictable mistakes that leave you on a roadside, dusty and indignant. There’s standing up for your side, but still listening to the other, and always an extra side of French fries. You’re always outside: side stepping rail tracks weaving through mountains or on a towel beachside, flicking specks of sand at shells. There are a lot of loud conversations, but the best are quiet minutes spent lying on your side counting someone’s freckles.

There’s turning your head sideways to see things differently on countryside riversides with multisided people; waking up on the wrong side of the bed only to learn that both sides are the same when you sleep in the middle. There’s a lot of considering and exciting secret side doors, but not everything is easy. You get kicked curbside and blindsided; sidetracked and misdirected. Sideways isn’t for relaxing. You’re always bothered. And sweaty for some reason. Besides, we’re all young and a little lost in Sideways, constantly looking side to side because we don’t want to miss anything.

We always miss something.

As it stands, you don’t get a lot of time in Sideways before you start growing up and looking down.

Listening to these people coming and going, I understand that it’s nice to just be somewhere. You pull planned weekends around you, know where you start and end, what you can and can’t afford to have or lose. You schedule things to look forward to, count vacation days like heavy gold coins you stole from the next door gypsie.

But when we look for moments, we miss them. When we get distracted by destinations, we miss Sideways: the bumbling, bouncing, baffled in-between.

We all make it to Up or Down. What matters is remembering to veer: veer gracefully, veer accidentally, veer violently…just turn.

We’ll remember what it’s like — that it’s mighty nice — to live in the thick of life.

i’m great at wobbling. sometimes, but mostly never, good at catching myself.

ideally, i like going with the flow, but a far-from-near-death experience reminded me that i’m terrified of currents.

i wake up at 5:35am to take a gym class called INSANITY most likely because i am insane. but

also because i think sweat is the closest thing we have to starting over.

i hang on every word, leap between sentences, and take silence as failure.

i have room to be at a loss for words more often.

i’ve been told to write what i know, but i’m not an expert at anything. however, i am still writing. i’m always waiting for someone to stop me, so that i can tell them they can’t.

the only thing i’m good at is being optimistic. this makes others believe that the only thing i’m good at is being bad at growing up.

i am not naive. i am not delusional. i am not sheltered.

if i spent every day reading the news like it was the only news, i wouldn’t get out of bed

and i love waking up. being optimistic is my own alarm clock.

i eat a sunny side up egg in the morning. not because it’s appropriate, but because it’s delicious.

i also love avocados, but i didn’t until they became famous. this is the only time i’ve ever been glad to be a follower. i am an avocado groupie.

i respect a lot of people, and also hate them because i respect them so much. screw you guys for being so much better than anything i could imagine.

i will be greater than anything i could’ve imagined. this means that someday, i will quote myself.

i hate the word eager, but i feel it all the time.

hankering, yearning, and pining are just as bad. thanks but no thanks thesaurus.com.

i am sincerely certain that for everything i have seen, am seeing, and will see, there are no words.

and that’s the most truth of all.

This morning you woke up with lungs. I don’t necessarily know what the process is, but throw biology at these saggy wind bags and your vocal chords jiggle. Somehow, when this happens, you sing. A plenty few WILDLY misguided people say I’m terrible at this particular function. That’s okay, s’long as I can do it.

Yesterday morning a train conductor got up to do his job. That train conductor, who I can only guess drinks his coffee at 4:30am to board the first train, smiles. As he travels down the Providence/Stoughton line he says, “Nice!” whenever anyone shows him an electronic ticket, and “Nice!” whenever someone stands in just the right spot on the platform where the train door meets their feet. He does this as if his actual job is picking small, miraculous things out of a 7am world that most people make out to be mundane. He does this as if he really loves his work.

Last evening two strangers laughed at the same thing. They’ll probably never see each other again, but in that unique minute they shared something with a minuscule percentage of 7.4 billion (1.4285714e-10 %). I laughed at the same thing they were laughing at, but they didn’t notice. This is okay with me.

On one ordinary day, you will unexpectedly meet someone and find them tolerable. Days after, you might think this very same person is likable. You have a few conversations with them. You laugh together over a video of Peeta Mellark being replaced by pita bread. You grow close. Eventually, you go out with this person and they get so drunk that they insist an innocent stranger kiss their elbow. Suddenly, you realize you’ve made a friend for life. That ordinary day seems to you less ordinary.

Every spring and summer there are flowers, beautiful pops of smelly color. These things called flowers EAT sunlight. I tried doing it for a bit but it didn’t work out. Apparently eating sunlight isn’t as easy as it looks. I will try again tomorrow and remain sincerely impressed for the rest of my days.

Every night you go to sleep and time travel. One moment you close your eyes and the next it’s a brand new day in a brand new world and you take a deep breath with those lungs of yours and let out a dramatic groan because time travel worked too quickly. Maybe sometime in between closing your eyes and opening them you owned your own tootsie roll factory or made out with that athletic trainer who gave you a bandaid once. These things may be called dreams, but might in fact be as real as life.

Now, I know these things are small and forgettable, but that’s why I wrote them down.

It’s not a pleasant place, but somehow we keep coming back. We're encouraged by the dusty redolence of hard work and the feeling that, because we're inflicting this mundane environment upon ourselves, the sacrifice will somehow pay off to a larger success. But for me, sitting in that room for a team meeting one late Tuesday night, success seemed like a joke. We were sincerely getting nowhere.

The assignment was to “Invent something original.” This is something that seems easy until you actually try it, like yoga or just eating one potato chip. Looking back on the assignment now, I'm realizing how farfetched our Professor’s faith in our abilities must be. I'm flattered, but also, is he crazy? These days, even having an original thought is applaudable. We sat there in our swamp looking hopeless, each one of us braving to put an idea out there, crawling out of our shells only to scurry back in when the idea tragically deflated.

After what seemed like a hundred rounds of this we finally caught hold of something…something okay. It happened subtly — starting out as an idea we didn’t completely hate — and then grew and evolved until we were engaged, building, smiling at the momentum, relieved that perhaps we wouldn’t be failures after all. The swamp became some place we wanted to be; our couches became thrones. This didn’t suck! How beautiful not being terrible can be.

Shoeties by Zappos. A service invented by Yanqitian Huang (strategist), Stephanie Semet (maker), Lauren Beader (copywriter), Eleanor Rask (art director) and myself (if I’m writing this much then I must be a copywriter). What started out as a lost-and-found service that would pair people missing a glove or shoe turned into something more meaningful. Shoeties targets a very specific but rather significant percentage of Americans: those who have different sized feet, or even just one foot.

If that seems bizarre, it’s because it is. But like proud and oblivious parents, we loved our weird-looking baby regardless. We took care of the idea, backtracked when we needed to, and slowly began to believe in its ability to actually stand on its own.

We started to call our idea good.

Now, as advertising students, this is a rare occurrence. We hid our confidence from our classmates like it was something we weren't even sure of ourselves. “Our idea is okay, I guess we'll see,” we said with our couch shrugs. But it was all coming together: a service that would connect someone looking for only one shoe for one foot with someone who was looking for the same size shoe but for the opposite foot. No longer would people with two different sized feet have to buy two pairs of shoes, and paraplegics wouldn’t have to buy two shoes when they only needed one. There was also a social aspect that we added: the two people would be able to chat with each other, and swap their experiences in their shared pair of shoes. And what better company to have this service than Zappos? A retail company committed to customer service in all its forms. What seemed like an ordinary service was actually never successfully invented before, and what a pity we thought.

Maybe it should be invented, we thought.

When we looked at our final layout, we were proud. Ecstatic. And even though we were students, we still had the gall to say our idea was good because we knew how much work we had put into it. We ourselves saw it come together. Born out of desperation. Out of a swamp. It was our own success, and just like the parents we are, we want a little more for our idea. We can’t help but hope, dream a little dream, that maybe out of that swamp of the 3rd floor in the George Sherman Union, something bigger was created.

Let me know if you agree:

http://www.kristinasaliba.com/#/shoeties-by-zappos/

Why We Had the Audacity to Call Our Idea “Good” was originally published in Perspectives on Advertising on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It happened so quickly.

One moment I could say with absolute certainty that never in my life had I been spit on, and the next? I'm standing on a street in Amsterdam wondering since when does rain fall horizontally? I could hear my fiery Colombian friend throw curses in someone’s general direction, but I was mostly staring down at my leg in an interesting mix of bemused horror.

Needless to say, being abroad has meant a whole lot of different things. In fact, I could even go as far as saying that being abroad has changed me as a person. Examples:

• I used to be a person that had never been spit on. Now I am a person that has been spit on.
• I used to be completely confident in my ability to survive on my own. Now I am fully aware that it takes a considerable amount of what I call “mom” to do this.
• I used to think I knew what was going on in the world, now the only thing I know is that I know nothing.
• I used to speak broken French. Now I still speak broken French, just with complete unwarranted confidence (read: swag).
• I used to get lonely on my own, now I talk to myself.

Granted, some of these (all of these) changes are alarming. But they're a good kind of alarming, and I've actually learned that there’s a difference.

Bad Alarming (taken directly from my inbox & the reason why I dreaded getting emails from Boston University more than usual):

Good Alarming: Coming to the conclusion that you're never done growing as a person. It’s terrifying, really. It makes you want to say, “No thanks world, Netflix is on.” It gives you way too much responsibility because unlike Bad Alarming, which you happily have no control over, you can actually do something about the Good Alarming — and who wants to do something about anything? That takes way too much effort. I can keep relying on my wonderful mother, I can stay blissfully ignorant about the world around me, I can give up on French completely…

…but I shouldn’t.

When I was abroad I learned that I should take all my shortcomings and run with them. Sure, at the beginning it'd be more like run, trip, get up, try running again, run into a wall, run in the wrong direction, give up for a little bit and eat some sad ice cream, get up and run into a wall again…

But regardless I should try to do better, even it’s the Good Alarming that makes you want to stay in bed all day, and even if I have a higher chance at failing than I do at breathing air. I’ve got a long way to go and I think that’s going to be the only constant in my life.

Since that fateful day, I haven't taken my new status as “person who has recently been spit on” as a set back. I haven’t looked at it and thought wow, I guess I’m someone who wanders into a bike lane and gets spit on.

Instead, I’m trying to be more aware of my surroundings so that I don’t join the Spit-On-Twice Club. I’m trying to be more optimistic by thinking that maybe the perpetrator was aiming at something different — maybe a plant that looked thirsty? I’m trying to be more human by learning about this damn big world we live in. Maybe that way I can be someone who got spit on, but also someone who made things better for people.

So my lesson from all of this? Cherish the spit. Take the spit and run with it. Be horrified at the spit for a little while, but then laugh about it. Learn a little.

That’s how spit can change you.

1. He’s an old light; dim (witted) a bit, maybe even senile. I don’t doubt he’s seen things he can never un-see, because this dorm room has housed thousands of students over so many years. And Paris is dirty in a lot of ways. Take from that what you will. Maybe that’s why he falters so much; the memories are too pungent. If this is the case, I shouldn’t take it too personally.

2. He heard from the automatic soap dispensers how funny it is watching me helplessly flail and thought about how long it’s been since he had a good laugh.

3. He has a personal vendetta against me. Possible reasons include: my shower sandals offend him, I shine brighter than he does, he doesn’t believe my Hibiscus Tahiti soap actually comes from Tahiti, I lied to him when I said I would work out every day and he can clearly tell, I refuse to make contact with any of his shower walls, I sing La Vie en Rose with too much flair for someone who doesn't know any of the words, I turn him on too much and/or he doesn't understand my new fear of locking bathroom doors.

4. I haven't moved in the shower for quite some time and, seeing as the motion sensor light turns on when he senses motion, he turns off. (This seems like the most unlikely case).

5. I’m invisible. As scientifically unlikely as this may seem, this phenomenon has happened in many scenarios here in Paris. Sometimes it’s on purpose; it’s when I try to blend in. This is optimal for walking along encountered side streets I want to observe without being bothered, riding the metro late at night without giving my mother a reason to worry (don’t worry mum!), and going into the same Boulangerie for the 4th time in one day without the pastry chef recognizing me.

But sometimes, it’s not on purpose. Like when I speak French to a coworker and they don’t answer me because I was too shy to speak French on the decibel level required for humans to actually hear what was just said. Or when strangers don’t smile back when I smile at them on the street, but rather avert their eyes because if they smile back it would mean obliterating the stereotype that French people are unfriendly. (They would rather I just remain invisible). Or lastly, when two French women cut in front of a line I had been standing in for 10 minutes because — nope I don’t know why they did that. Lucky for them I only spoke French in angry whispers they couldn't possibly hear.

My Conclusion

If I had to choose one hypothesis, I would go with the automatic soap dispensers because those fuckers are cruel. And if the logic follows, I soon won’t be so invisible to the French for much longer. You see, my motion-sensor shower light is French. He grew up here. He likes baguettes. And even though he clicks off at the perfect time to get shampoo in my eyes, he still recognizes me eventually when I blindly swing all my limbs in his general direction.

So yet again, I’ll take what I’ve learned from a bathroom (this is a weird theme that’s developing) and I’ll apply it. Not literally, of course. I don’t think jumping around naked in front of those two rude women would have solved any problems. But I do think that being a little more of myself — that awkward, constantly flailing person — will gain a little more attention when I want it to. I’ll talk to my coworkers at the same volume I sing Edith Piaf, I’ll add a frantic wave to those strangers I smile at, and the next time two women cut a very clearly defined line? I’ll make sure they see me.

I never imagined that my first workday in Paris would involve hyperventilating next to a toilet in a very small bathroom.

But that’s exactly what my first workday in Paris involved.

Save your pity. I wasn’t there to gather my thoughts or to turn on the faucet so it could drown out my sobs. I was genuinely in that bathroom to pee. I drank a lot of water that day.

The hyperventilating was a result of the lock breaking.

Okay. Now you can pity me. Feel free to also picture how horrified I was, turning some sad excuse for a knob as much as I could to release the door. It didn’t budge. I immediately tried to figure out how much I would have to pay for the door they were going to have to break down; I started wondering if they would think this was some American thing, getting stuck in bathrooms. I started to apologize to America for making it look bad. I tried again. No luck. Anxiety commenced.

Paris has been like this: a series of mishaps. It’s been microwaved sandwiches and so much cheese; thin dorm room walls and an extremely sexually active neighbor. It’s been constant misunderstanding and more cheese. It’s been a lot of work.

You’ll be happy to know that the bathroom had a window. It was small and just low enough so I could see through it while I was sweating through my trying-to-impress-French-people clothes. It was a window I seriously considered as an exit at one point, but 3 stories up eventually reasoned with that idea. It was a window with some cracked glass and low resolution, but it was also a window that looked out onto the street below. It was an amazing view for a bathroom.

This is also Paris: beautiful. It stands there patiently, looking good, smiling while you try to figure out your life; laughing as you hyperventilate next to a toilet in a very small bathroom.

It’s a city that is easily forgiven.

Walking out of Connelly Partners one rainy Thursday afternoon, my understanding of advertising shifted in a small but important way. The reason? I had just finished interviewing Jonathan Plazonja, Executive Creative Director at ismcp, and someone I learned quite a lot from in a short hour.

I began the interview with a topic Jonathan had mentioned once before: stories. My intrigue as a writer couldn’t help itself; it was the first time someone had put something so innately human in the context of something I’ve tended to view as frigidly impersonal.

“There’s still room to tell longer stories in advertising,” Jonathan said, despite his admission that people these days are suffering from what he called “self-induced ADD” — a world of people with attention spans shorter than ever. “It’s like film; if the story is good, then people will keep paying attention, but a bad story is interminable. No one ever said the Godfather was too long.” I understood, but I wasn’t completely convinced. He continued: “There are plenty of products that merit a longer story, products you want to know more about. If everyone is doing short copy, why not do long? When others are zigging, you have to zag.” I remember smiling — he had a point, and my hopes lifted a little. Maybe if there was an audience for longer stories advertising wouldn’t be so bad; maybe I could be the zag and get away with it.

When I asked Jonathan what makes for a good advertisement, his answer attuned perfectly to his belief in stories. His first two qualifications were straightforward enough: the ad must never underestimate the intelligence of its audience (my mind immediately went to Kate Upton scantily charging into battle), and don't assume that just because something is “on strategy” it will be successful getting through to people.

It was his third qualification that really interested me. “Look for simple, human truths; look for things that people can relate to, whether it’s sad or funny, things that make you say hey, that was me when I was younger, or that resonates.” It was the stories again — the common chord that winds through every life. It’s a chord you have to hit perfectly to make things sound human and real, and not fabricated by some twice-removed CDO that doesn’t remember what it’s like to struggle a little. According to Jonathan, in order for a creative to stay on top of things, “you have to be a human sponge, soak up as much as possible, ride the T even if you have a car, go to bars even if you don’t like to be social, know what people are walking around with on the street, what people are talking about and what’s on people’s minds. You have to read a lot — read about the whole world — travel, know who’s doing the good work and not just in the US but also in Sao Paulo, Singapore, Sydney.” In other words: “be an insatiable observer of the human condition.”

And that was it. My hope sprung eternal like a seven year old with a jump rope on repeat. Advertising isn’t just about selling to people; it’s about understanding people. It’s about knowing the stories that connect people in a world that’s more fragmented than ever. And if you find those stories first, those big ideas that catch ahold of people’s attention because they recognize that human element, then the rest follows — the creativity flows from that personal touch. That kind of creativity is power. It’s not something that everyone can do, which is what bothers Jonathan about advertising today. “Agencies are being marginalized. All these new tools make clients think they can do the ads themselves.” But it’s not the tools that make the ideas good; it’s the people behind them. “Big ideas trump big data every time.”

I then asked Jonathan the question I feared hearing the answer to most, bracing myself for what he was going to say: “has there ever been a time when you didn’t like advertising or what you’re doing?” My anticipation that the question was going to hang in the air as he thought long and hard about the answer was entirely unfounded. His response came immediately. “Almost daily,” he replied. “It’s a love-hate relationship. Some days you do feel like a sellout.” I slumped, hopefully imperceptibly, but most likely not. “But advertising can also change the world.” I nodded at the examples he gave — Barack Obama’s Change poster, Lyndon Johnson’s famous 30-second spot, the work that Alex Bogusky is doing at his new “social impact” agency called Fearless — but I had already acquiesced to the fact that it’s an uphill battle, and always will be. Advertising will always feel like selling a little bit of your soul. And yet…for some reason, that confirmation sat a little sounder with me than usual, and it was sincerely because of the person who was sitting in front of me, and all the other mentors I’ve had the fortune to meet in this industry. Here was Jonathan Plazonja, someone who, even from sitting only an hour with, I learned was a very intelligent, empathetic, and socially conscious person — and he had spent his entire career in advertising. These weren’t mutually exclusive. Realizing that alone changed so much for me. If anything, that’s what I would want to thank Jonathan the most for.

At the end of the day, there are always going to be problems you can’t solve. No one can do everything in the world, but we can try to do everything within our capabilities. My roommate, who may someday save a child’s life, isn’t going to have the power to make people pay attention and care on a large scale — but I might be able to. Do not under any circumstance put any surgical tool in my hands, but give me a pencil and maybe I can do some good. Maybe some days that will be enough and maybe some days it won’t. From what I learned from Jonathan Plazonja on that rainy Thursday afternoon, I think that was the best story we shared.

A rainy day interview with Jonathan Plazonja was originally published in Perspectives on Advertising on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Enter the UNICEF Tap Project, an initiative to raise money for children around the world who don’t have access to clean water. This is an immensely important issue that affects millions of people around the world, but isn’t necessarily given a second thought by those who are lucky enough to not have to think about whether their children are going to live past age 5 or, more often than not, die from a diarrheal disease.

The rules of the service were simple: for every 15 minutes you don’t use your phone, sponsors and donors of the initiative will fund one day of clean drinking water for a child in need.

This idea, thought of and executed by Droga5, was simple and brilliant because it leveraged existing behavior (people constantly on their phones) to focus on a larger social issue, one that wouldn't normally interrupt someone’s daily life. When there are selfies to post, emails to send, and friends to text, what is a child suffering thousands of miles away? The Tap Project brought the issue in a succinct and easily digestible form straight into your hands: if you want to do some good in the world, don't touch your phone. This set-up also made it incredibly easy for people to participate: you didn’t have to go out of your way to change the world and eradicate poverty, you didn’t even have to donate money. All that was asked was a sacrifice of 15 minutes on a device that, more often than not, detracts from your own standard of living. In that way, I truly see the Tap Project as a win-win.

This brand has not only provided a service, but it would have been a disservice to thousands of people had anyone not used it. Points to humanity, many people did use this service. According to the website, 5.4 years worth of water have been provided to those who need it. Since I’m a writer and not some sort of human calculator, I asked a friend to do the math: roughly 187,000 fifteen minute increments of no-phone time were donated. Whether that’s 187,000 people or there were those good souls who could live without their phones for half an hour or more, that number is still a difference made in someone’s life.

It’s these kinds of campaigns that make give me a sense of purpose working in this industry, and it’s my only hope that someday I can donate whatever fraction of creativity I have in these fingers to help anyone and everyone in this world.

Breaking Habit into Helpful was originally published in Perspectives on Advertising on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.