This is sort of a second part to my recent task Dream Boxes
Having completed that task, I was left in possession of six dream boxes that needed homes. I had made them with the intention of giving them away and completing this task seemed an excellent way to go about doing that.

I am a bit of a daydreamer. I have often times had fantastical daydreams of being approached by a stranger, someone who seems otherworldly in some way, and having the stranger give me something quite magical. I wanted to play out this fantasy to the best of my ability, and since no strangers ever approach me and give me things I figured it made sense to reverse the roles and become the stranger.
I already had the "magical" items for giving away:

(stolen from the Dream Boxes completion and now missing one)

Sadly, being the otherworldly stranger of my fantasies would be difficult. I am a human and quite human looking. My imagination conjures up creatures that I can not be, probably for the very reason that I can not be them. But I did have access to sparkles. And sparkles are exciting. And even if I could not turn myself into something from another world, I could at least look out of the ordinary.
So I put on a frilly dress (much of which would unfortunately have to be covered by a jacket due to weather), bleached out a bunch of my hair, donned some ridiculous tights and shoes, adorned myself with a "headdress", and covered myself with sparkles.



Julian Muffinbot agreed to be my stealthy video taping cohort in this endeavor. We set out into the rainy Chicago night and got on the train. I actually lost track of what trains we rode, though I know we rode at least one train on (and sometimes several) on the Blue, Brown, and Pink lines and also rode the Ashland bus.

In some ways my fantasy was a bit shattered. Many people were not very receptive. Several people seemed downright terrified of the boxes. But the folks who did end up with them were pleased and thankful. Confused, but happy.

When watching keep in mind this was a difficult task to document and Muffinbot did a great job under the circumstances. I absolutely did not want the recipients to see that they were being taped, otherwise it would have taken away from the randomness and specialness of the situation and made them feel like they were the subject of some prank.

First Gifting

The first gifting was definitely the smoothest and thus did not prepare me for what was to come. The recipient, a boy who I had thought was a girl until we were face to face, seemed only slightly confused but said "thank you" and took the box and smiled.


First Refusal
Next I attempted to give a box to a lady who absolutely did not want it. Oh the rejection.



Second Successful Gifting


This one happened very quickly. The recipient did not have anything to say and seemed completely confused. He took the box and then looked down sheepishly and I walked away.

This was followed by another refusal that was not caught on video.


Third Gifting


This gifting was the most unmagical of them all but was interesting in that this the recipient, unlike the others, was not taken back with confusion but instead very curious and asked many questions about what I was doing and why. He did seem impressed that I made the box (and then immediately broke it). Sadly there were some problems with this video. The camera focuses on the recipient right off that bat and then for some reason Muffinbot chose to move the focus to the floor for the remainder of the video. The audio is captured though and you here his first question, "would you like to explain?" before the camera shuts off.

At this point I had given away half the boxes and had three more to go. I had taken note of and found troubling the fact that all the males who had been offered boxes had accepted while all the females had refused. I had a lot of theories as to why this may be but truly I had such a small sampling that I didn't focus on the theories and simply decided to make sure the next box given away was given to a girl, no matter how long it took.


The fourth box


My next attempt, to a woman, was successful. There was a while between stops after the gifting and though I had moved away from the recipient and could no longer watch her, Muffinbot noted that the girl spent the rest of the time attempting to open the box, seemingly mystified as to how to go about doing it. This was very interesting since the boxes are quite straightforward. We developed a little fantasy of her bringing the box home, setting it on the dresser, and periodically looking at it with wonder for the rest of her life having never figured out how to open it.


The fifth box


I had decided before starting this task I would be giving the boxes to adults and not children. This was mostly because it would make me feel really sad to offer the box to a child and have a protective parent insist they could not have it. But also because I think overall adults have a lot fewer magical things happen to them than children. The fifth box was given to a group of three women and a child. I was drawn to them because of how the adults were interacting with the child, and I'm pretty sure the child ended up with the box in the end, but I actually gave it to one of the adults. This was a very wonderful gifting and I think a big part of this was because the recipient(s) did not seem to speak english. The woman took the box, smiled, nodded her head in appreciation, and showed it to the child and there were no questions or "thank yous" to make the interaction more normal or understandable. I liked this. It actually made me wish I'd thought to either speak in jibberish all night or not speak at all. Granted I may be a little biased here. I am not a verbal person and prefer to communicate in different ways so perhaps that is why I felt the nonverbal interactions were more beautiful. But yes, it became apparent to me that the less verbal the interaction the more magical it felt.


The final box


I suggest not watching this video unless you are interested in watching a long video of life on a Chicago bus. It is blurry and might cause motion sickness and does not show any gifting. In this attempt I go to the back of a very crowded bus and find it impossible to give away my box. People seem downright scared of me and my box. I was close to giving up and deciding to keep the box when I found the perfect recipients. They were a rather adorable couple. When I gave them the box they were absolutely enchanted and could not comprehend how I could just give it away. The woman offered me money for it. When I refused money she tried to think of other things she could give me. She seemed quite close to offering the shirt off her back but I told her I'd made the box with the intention of giving it away and I did not want anything in return. Here is a very brief video taken after I'd walked away from the couple of them with the box.

The video you should watch


This experience was definitely interesting. In some ways it was difficult to give away things I'd put so much effort into making when I felt like some of the recipients might not appreciate them. I had to know that yes, one of these people might walk off the train and toss their box into the garbage and I just had to be okay with that as it was my choice to give it to them. It was even more difficult to have people refuse, to be treated as though I was doing something aggressively offensive by offering a gift. But I also understand that people find offensive that which they don't understand and that it is very hard to trust and be open to something that doesn't fit into one's everyday reality. In the end though I feel like each person I interacted with, even those who refused their gift, were affected by the act. I think the extent to which they were affected and the way in which they were affected varied greatly, but they were all affected in some way and that made it completely worth it.


COMMENTS FROM THE VIDEOGRAPHER:
Julian Muffinbot here with some added input from behind the camera. As Dela Dejavoo notes this was not an easy task to document because no one could see that I was filming them. Also, I am not exactly skilled in this stuff. These are really the only videos I've ever taken. And Dela insisted I use her camera and not mine, which I am obviously less familiar with and thus there were a few times when I thought I was filming but the thing was not actually filming. This is why one of the rejections was not caught.

The other difficulty was that sometimes Dela would mutter things to me like "OK, my next target is the girl behind me" and I would start to focus on the girl, but it turned out she meant the girl behind her and to the side, so I would have to quickly change focus. Interestingly, on the last box, the couple I initially focused on in the video was the one I thought she meant, but her initial target was behind them. They (and many others) did not want the box, and she ended up giving it to the couple I thought she had meant in the first place. Though I did not catch that part on video because I thought she was done and only realized my mistake in time enough to catch them looking at the box.

I also want to add some observations of the woman who could not figure out how to open the box. These boxes are so easy to open that if you pick them up wrong they just *fall* open, so it was strange that she was wiggling the lid around, poking at the hinge, and otherwise examining the edges as though trying to figure out how to open it, but she did not actually just pull the lid and bottom apart. One of the ornamentations on the box is a lock-like metal thingy that does appear to be holding the box closed, but it so completely isn't that I was a bit baffled by the woman's inability to just open the box. The power of illusion, it is strong.