On Being Nice.

I’ve always carried around this great fear of offending people. Sometimes, when I’m looking at the mirror or looking at my photographs, I see it staring cautiously back.

Today, driving my sister to work, I carelessly decided to make left turn at the intersection (to clarify things, it’s perfectly legal to do so whatever color the stoplight’s flashing, just be sure the road is open) and ended up pissing off an oncoming taxi. His eyes popped out at me through the window and his mouth started moving rapidly and I didn’t bother to decipher what he was saying, as at the same time my ears were being assaulted by his perpetual horn. All throughout, I was lifting my left hand (an international sign for pardon, at least in my neighborhood), which was making it difficult to turn the wheel, that I didn’t even notice that the stoplight has already turned in my favor and had given me official rights to actually make this turn without offending anybody.

The point is, you can just imagine how my lips were quivering—well, almost. I managed to suck it up and bravely thought about how funny he looked (a flaring nostrilled hippo) and that for all I know that man might have been driving all night and going through all sorts of stress as a taxi driver who, based on a vague calculation I made a few years back, don’t really earn a lot on bad days, which is probably one of these (at which point I was actually glad for a moment that he had a chance to vent out all that horrible domestic or otherwise thwarted-dreams related stress he might have been bottling in, just too bad it was at me).

I told my sister so (not about the hippo part, or the glad about it part, just the he might have been driving all night bit) and she told me how nice I was to people, that I had even thought of that. I didn’t tell her I just didn’t want to offend people.

Wait, is that all nice is? Not offending people? Because that kind of makes me a doormat.

Well, okay, actually I just posed that question to make you think I had only realized that now, but really I’ve been trying to deal with it for years and still I think I haven’t progressed. I hate doormats (the people kind) because they remind me of me. I tend to have an unhealthy response to them, and it’s a part of me that I still have a bit of trouble accepting.

But then I figured that not everybody has this almost-neurotic need to be nice. If only to stop the viral chain that makes people look like enraged birthing mammals, this nice-ness might even be worth mastering. (Note to self- look up: diplomacy)