Sometimes I Try to be Nice

"Who said that? Did you say that?" a man asked his wife the other night at book club. She was sitting right by me so I had to confess that the rude remark had come out of my mouth and not hers. I'm much too nice to let someone else take the blame for my rudeness. Of course I am.

Stranger has been trying to teach me the subtleties of niceness. According to him it is sometimes nice to lie to people and rude to tell them the truth. I don't get it.

I always choose friends who can handle the hard cold facts. "No, I didn't listen to that book on tape you lent me. It was so nauseatingly cute and boring that I couldn't make it through the first chapter." And then when you tell me things like, "This salad is disgusting. Did the dressing call for dish soap?" I totally still love you because it just means more dish soap salad for me.

I'm not sure if it is possible for me to get my feelings hurt by someone who loves me. If you are married to me then I will remember every rude thing you have ever said and use it against you at every possible future moment but it won't hurt my feelings.

Of course if you are rude to me and it is obvious that you hate my guts then I will go home and cry my eyes out. For the rest of my life. Because who can live knowing there is even one single person on this earth who doesn't like them?

I am trying to learn to be nice though, really I am and I am already nice in my own little ways like, if you have food on your face I will tell you about it. But I warn you if I tell you once and then I see face food again I won't say anything the second time. I will just continue our conversation while being completely fascinated by the seagulls eating garbage outside the window. Boogers are another matter however. If I see boogers I go straight for the garbage. I can't even look at you long enough to ask you to wipe them away. If I didn't give birth to you then I really can't be held responsible for your boogers, ok?

And I'm nice in other ways too. I always return my shopping cart at the store. That's nice right? Not only that but I always take a shopping cart into the store with me so that it's one less cart that the shopping cart employee of the month has to retrieve. In fact I usually make my kids do it too. I know I won't be getting away with that very long because they are going to figure out that a family train of shopping carts going into the store doesn't look very cool. Even for home schoolers. Even for people who wear cowboy boots with shorts.

I hope you never get tired of the home schooling jokes because I never will. They always make me laugh because they are so true. I was just mentioning to my nine year old the other day, "That is exactly the kind of thing that makes home schoolers weird!" He decided to memorize a short poem and then the whole family re-wrote the poem using modern language except that it came out "rappy" and that's exactly how he was reciting it to us. In a white boy kind of way. I really should get that on video because that's not going to be cool in a few more years either and now that I've witnessed it I don't know if I can go the rest of my life without it.

Anyway. More about my niceness.

I always hang up all the clothes I try on in dressing rooms. Sometimes I have been tempted to leave the clothes sitting in a heap on the bench but then I sigh and hang them up anyway. Every single time I have felt tempted I have found something under the heap. Just little stuff like, oh, my sunglasses or my belt or my PURSE! See how you can be rewarded for doing the right thing? Or we can also learn that it pays to be organized even if we're lazy. Especially if we're lazy.

Some of you might be happy to hear of another nice thing I do. I click on your blog ads. Aren't I sweet? I figure you are making money according to how many clicks you get and it only takes a second so I do it. Tell me if I'm wrong ok? Maybe you get paid just from people looking at them. In that case I'm going to feel really stupid about all the clicking I've been doing. Stupid and nice.