By Alex

Spoiler alert: the world is an awful, awful place sometimes.

Surprised? Didn’t think so. The gallons of bloodshed that have been appearing in the headlines every single day have made it harder and harder for me to look past that simple fact. With genocide, discrimination, political strife and, thanks to that occasional bitch Mother Nature tearing apart some reactors in Japan, the possibility of an honest-to-God Godzilla attack becoming almost commonplace in our lives, it can be tough to keep your head up. And that’s not being emo. That’s just the sad truth.

So it’s refreshing when a random act proves that not all humans are filled with evil juice. That some are actually chalked full of a wonderful substance that looks like glitter, smells like cotton candy and effervesces into rainbows. Let’s call it love juice.

Enter the little, old, pink lady.

It was a pretty normal afternoon when I strolled into the Panera down the street. I ordered a small coffee and whole grain bagel with cream cheese, sat down by the window and took out my computer. After a bit of random browsing, a quiet voice with a thick, Eastern European accent squeaked from behind me.

“Excuse me,” a tiny old lady clad in pink from head to toe said. “My computer won’t connect to the Internet. Could you help me?”

Since I’m pretty sure that all senior citizens should wear life alert believe that whippersnappers can directly interact with technology via techno-organic tentacles that sprout from our fingertips, I said sure. Who am I to shatter that illusion?

The thing is, I really could have used those tentacles. I tried everything to exorcise whatever Internet demon was haunting this poor woman but nothing seemed to work. After multiple attempts at connecting, I told her that I was sorry but I just had no idea what the problem was.

“I guess you could just try restarting it,” I said as the shame of an entire generation of technophiles washed over me. “I hope that it works for you.”

I returned to my computer and continued doing incredibly important tasks like flipping between my Twitter and Facebook tabs. After a few minutes, the same little voice appeared.

“It worked!” she said, setting something on my table. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Great!” I said. “I’m glad.”

She smiled and as she walked back to her computer (also pink, also adorable), I picked up what she had set down and unwrapped a napkin from it. It was a chocolate bar. This little old woman had given me, a total stranger, a chocolate bar for basically doing nothing more than attempting to help her. In an instant, my heart grew three sizes and burst out of its wire frame Grinch-style. Had she been carrying around that chocolate bar all day, just waiting to bestow it upon a benevolent stranger? Had she purchased for herself as a memento of her deceased son Augustus who had perished in a horrible but totally-song-worthy chocolate-drenched death? It doesn’t really matter (although I like to think it was a mix of the two). Not since my elementary school’s “Random Acts of Kindness” month had I witnessed a more spontaneous and heartwarming deed. And since all of those were pretty much forced upon us thanks to 30 days of constant reminders from teachers, posters and one librarian who, for some reason, was all about kindness and the acts that manifested it, one could say those were hardly random.

The headlines are still soaked in blood. Mother Nature for some reason still fucking hates Japan. The Middle East continues to explode in rebellion, gunfire and, unfortunately, literal explosions.

In the grand scheme, giving a chocolate bar to someone isn’t much. Barely anything, really. Countless charities and humanitarian organizations do much, much more on a daily basis. But it served as an all-too-rare personal reminder that we are capable of doing genuine good in this world. And that’s not being sappy. That’s just the truth.

So let’s hope that an army of little old pink ladies is out there handing out chocolate bars to the world and that we all pay that shit forward like Haley Joel Osment told us to do years ago. Because, and this is the realest of real talk, you’d be surprised at how quickly an old woman’s love juice can brighten your day.