A Day In Which Taylor Swift Does Something Very Good And Something Very Bad

There’s no one out there right now more complex than Taylor Swift. She’s a mystery wrapped in a Goosebumps book sitting atop a grandfather clock in an abandoned sausage factory. I can’t even begin to try to understand her. And I won’t. I would never be so bold as to try to brave the insides of her brain.

Instead I’ll just give you two stories today, one in which she does something very good. And one in which she (or more likely, someone on her team) does something very bad. One will remind you that she’s not a lady-demon sent here to ruin our lives. The other one will just make you feel sad for tweens who are precocious enough to write handwritten letters.

So submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, I call the first story, “Taylor Swift visits a 10-year-old cancer patient who really wanted to meet her.” It’s a heartwarming tale that reminds that us Taylor Swift isn’t always looking for her next victim/song-topic.

10-year-old Lauren Hacker is a patient at the facility, and her family and friends have been lobbying for her to meet Swift via a social media campaign. Swift became aware of Hacker’s wish to meet her after seeing a YouTube video of her song ‘You Belong With Me,’ with the lyrics changed to address the girl and her battle with acute myelogenous leukemia.

“Taylor Swift stopped by Lauren’s room at the hospital around 1PM in the afternoon,” Hacker’s father posted on their family blog (quote via Gossip Cop). “She spent about an hour chatting with Lauren … [who] played a song on the electronic piano keyboard that she got for her birthday.”

All of her other annoying ish aside, I think it’s really sweet that Taylor took time out of her busy schedule to meet with Lauren Hacker. I think sometimes we all get so caught up pointing out all her flaws that we forget she’s a real live human being capable of doing good things. Just because I don’t like the message she spreads with her music doesn’t mean that I have to automatically hate everything she does. Maybe it would do me some good to take a deep breath every now and then and remember that.

And now onto story number two. A story that isn’t so much heartwarming as it is heartbreaking. A local Nashville news station reports via Buzzfeed that hundreds of unopened fan letters addressed to Taylor Swift were found in a dumpster. A place that the letter writers probably didn’t intend them to end up. (Unless fan mail’s much more symbolic these days than it used to be.) However her management promptly responded that it’s obviously a mistake that the letters ended up there and they’d be returned to Taylor Swift’s team immediately.

While this certainly isn’t Taylor Swift’s fault (she’s far too famous to deal with something as mundane as snail mail), it still doesn’t reflect very well on her just one week after sending Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to Hell. Right now she needs all the karma points she can get and tossing mail in the dumpster certainly doesn’t help with that. Then again she did visit a cancer patient in the hospital, so that’s like one billion brownie points right there.

And that concludes this week’s edition of Taylor Swift’s Capable of Good And Bad.

(Photo: Will Alexander/WENN.com)