The Art of Growing Up

So I’ve been training this neural network to generate cookbook recipes by letting it look at tens of thousands of existing recipes.

The generated titles can get a bit odd.

There’s a creativity variable I can set when the network is generating new recipes, and when I set it low, it comes up with its best guess at the most quintessential recipe titles:

Cream Cheese Soup Cream Of Sour Cream Cheese Soup Chocolate Cake (Chocolate Cake) Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake Chocolate Chips Chocolate Chips With Chocolate Chips

When I tell it to get creative, things get even weirder.

me:

It’s a breezy summer day and the rustling from the leaves outside sound like whispers from my small apartment. I’m sitting in front of my laptop, silently studying the 1.6 billion faces speaking simultaneously in front of me. It’s Monday, the day of the weekly conference call between all Muslims. We have been required to attend this Skype meeting from the the tender age of fetus, but I had never spoken in one of them before. 

That changes today. 

“Hey guys, what if…” I start to say. 

Nobody hears me, but I refuse to be silent. How could I show my face again on Tumblr if I couldn’t even save my mayonnaise friends from death? How could I expect to earn their respect? Anon was right; why hadn’t I done this before? Thousands of lives had paid the price for my ignorance, but not anymore.

“What if you guys….. stopped killing people.“ 

Suddenly, silence. 

1,643,398,023 pairs of eyes are on me. My heart is in my throat as the ISIS leader gives me a blank expression. 

A single tear rolls down my cheek. "Please.” I say with a broken voice. 

He is moved. 

My fingers are almost shaking as I carefully type in the ten digit phone number I have had memorized my entire life. The buttons on my home phone seem to glow a bit more dull, and even the ringing of the phone from the other end seems to be agonized, almost as if the world is telling me to hang up. But I refuse to give up; I can’t let my lily-white friends down. Not again.

The phone rings once. Twice. Three times. Still no answer. Just as I am about to hang up, there is a click.

All I can hear is heavy breathing.

“Hello….” I say quietly, my voice shaking. “Is….. Is this Muslim?”

There was a long silence before I heard a voice answer “ya lol”.

“I was thinking………..” I begin cautiously. “Maybe murder is…………bad.”

“Habibi, I…..I don’t understand. What are you trying to say….?” The voice seems shaken.

“What if…….world peace is good and killing people is…………not good”

He lets out an audible gasp. “Are you saying ISIS is…….bad?”

“Maybe death is…….not good.” I continue. My heart is racing. I remind myself that I am saving thousands of lives, and inhale.

The silence from the other end of the line is almost deafening. He seemed to be thinking, as if he had never considered this idea before in his life. Truly I had opened his heart and his mind. This…. This could end terrorism.

“Muslim….Please.” I whisper.

I hear a tear roll down his cheek, with my Muslim Communication Hearing™ and hold my breath as he finally breathes out his next words.

Acquire several dozen limes.

Go up to them and then drop all the limes.

Start picking them up, but keep dropping them. The clumsier you look the better.

Keep doing this until you have their attention (this could take up to thirty minutes).

Finally gather up the limes. Try looking a bit sheepish.

Look them deeply in the eyes and say, “Sorry. I’m bad at Pickup Limes.”

YOU HAVE

NO RIGHT

TO MAKE THAT FACE