“I think I’m going to write a humorous essay,” I said to my husband recently. “What should I write about?”

“Write about how everyone always wants to punch you in the head,” he said.

“What should I call it?” I asked him.

“Call it ‘Everyone always wants to punch me in the head’,” he suggested.

“That’s good, because it’s true. And what should I do with it when I finish it?”

“Take it to a therapist,” he suggested.  Then he went on to suggest that I write an essay about how supportive my husband is, and how he has to put up with all my crazy quirks.

Everyone DOES always want to punch me in the head, or shove me out of their way, or run me over with their car, or jostle me, or slam into me with their shoulders, or randomly accuse me of being from Montana while ramming a bicycle into my side. I’d like to think this is true for 90% of New Yorkers, but I seem to have a particular magnet for this type of activity. In one instance, I was actually accused of assaulting someone else. A woman came up from behind me on the G train (also known as the Crazy Train; more on that later) and said “Did you just HIT me?” I tried to explain that it would not have been possible for me to hit her since I was in front of her, and that I had never seen her before in my life, but she did not seem to be buying it. Finally after repeating “I did not hit you, I have never even seen you before” multiple times she retreated to the other end of the subway car. At which point I said at a level she could not possibly hear, “Yeah, bitch, if I hit you, you’d KNOW it.”

I used to be nice to people. I used to say Excuse me, please, and so on. Another time on the subway, I tried to be nice to a woman and she yelled at me. She looked like she was about to sit down on a seat that had some kind of mysterious liquid on it (hopefully water) so I said to her, “Oh, you don’t want to sit there, the seat is wet.” She snapped, “I wasn’t ABOUT TO SIT DOWN!!!!”  So I said, “Sorry, I was trying to be nice to you, I won’t do it again.” Another time in an airport, I was trying to collect my luggage from a carousel, and there were a few people standing in my way. I saw my luggage and said, “Excuse me” but they were in conversation and didn’t hear me. I said it again, and then a third time, and finally said “EXCUSE ME I need to get my luggage PLEASE” and when I went to grab my luggage a woman yelled at me for pushing her.

So, I’ve had to make a conscious effort to not be so nice to people, because it usually backfires. Sure, I am still nice to many groups of people (and animals), including my family, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, pets, bees, the elderly, the sick, you know, the usual. I volunteer regularly for worthy causes. I am a nice person. But being nice to strangers?  I’m over it. Every time I try it, I just get yelled at or accused of doing something terrible or shoved.

Recently, I was meeting my friend Liz and some of her friends at a bar in Manhattan. Liz wisely decided to get there early to claim a table in the backyard, yards of any kind being a rarity in Manhattan and therefore much in demand, particularly during the summer. I was one of the first of her friends to arrive, along with another friend of hers named, let’s say, Peter, since that is not his real name. Peter is a doctor, and was telling us amusing/disgusting stories, such as one about a man who came in to his hospital with “a bolus of meat lodged in his esophagus” (Liz and I, being word-nerds who love crossword puzzles and Boggle games and such, appreciated his use of the word ‘bolus’ which Liz noted). He also mentioned how it is tough to dislodge a bolus from the esophagus, because the area around the esophagus is like a vacuum, and “as you know,” he told us, “nature detests a vacuum.’

            “Yes,” I agreed. “Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum.”

            “I prefer ‘detests’,” Peter said.

            “Detests it is,” I agreed pleasantly. We were discussing the type of meat involved in the bolus, and I asked if it was a canned meat, and then I told another story about an observation I had made on the G train. A man was trying to open a can of meat, and asked another passenger for help, but the key came off and the can could not be opened. After the man with the can left, the other passenger said “I think that meat was rancid.”

            “Oh, the guy with the bolus wasn’t homeless,” Peter said.

            “I didn’t say the guy on the G train was homeless. In fact, he had a pretty fancy MP3 player. Not an i-Pod though, so who knows,” I told him.

Peter also told us a story about a lady who came in to the hospital with some kind of bubbling beneath the surface of her knee, indicating some kind of anaerobic bacteria infecting the knee. They put a drain in, but the lady came back a week later with the same symptoms – which didn’t make any sense, since oxygen was now getting into the wound via the drain. So one of the doctors sent her knee drainage fluid to the lab, and it turns out there was raspberry soda in it. Raspberry soda?

Peter explained, “She had Munchausen’s symptom. She was doing it to herself.”

So while we were discussing these medical oddities and other lovely topics of conversation such as infectious diseases and “poop transfusions” (thanks, Liz) some people at the table next to ours asked if they could sit at our table, which we were trying to reserve for the other soon-to-arrive friends of Liz.

 ”Oh, we’re waiting for people,” Liz told them. “But you can sit there until they arrive.”

“Bad move,” I told Liz. “You give people an inch and they’ll take a mile. We’ll never get rid of them.”

Peter seemed appalled. “Oh, they’ll move when other people get here,” he said.

“Oh no,” I told him. “There will be some kind of problem. I have a history with these kinds of things.”

Well, as it turns out the people left before the other friends arrived, and they thanked Liz for letting them sit there as they left. I should have known that they would be all right, because one of the men was wearing a pocket square, and who in this world besides a gentleman wears a pocket square? Not thugs! Not rude people!

“See,” Peter told me. “It pays to be nice.”

“I am nice.” I told him. “In fact, I’m so nice that I had to stop being so nice to people, because people always think they can screw around with me because I look so sweet and innocent, and then I’m nice to them, and they try to punch me in the head or something.”

“We should all be like Liz,” he continued. “Liz is nice to people. Liz was nice to those people and they appreciated it. We can all learn a lesson from Liz about how to be nice to people.” He went on for another 12 minutes about The Importance of Being Nice.

Finally I said, “How about the lesson of how to be SUBTLE?”

So, it’s now quite possible that Peter wants to punch me in the head as well.

Tags: Totally random //