I hate thinking. Looking at my monitor, somebody was forcing me to do so.
The words gathered in tiny town meeting in my IM window, "My friend had a shoe shopping emergency today and I couldn't help her. "
Uhm, and I can? Why are you telling me? I'm a guy. I believe in the shoe trinity: Work, play and dress. All other shoes are false footwear. Shoe emergency? How can I relate to that?
I chose sarcasm: "OH THE HORROR!!!"
The beauty of sarcasm in generation text is that it doesn't get you smacked by the nearest flail-able object. Well, that and the nearest flail-able chat object is, at worst, an angry emoticon. "OMG, that hurt…" Yeah, more sarcasm. People love it. In real life, sarcasm hurts. I don't know how many purse dogs I've had flung across my skull.
"Yelp!"
"Ow!"
LOL!
Luckily for me, in cyberspace no one can see you sneer. Sometimes people take me seriously. "I know!!!" was my friend's reply. She thought I was serious.
Yeah, I like text. More than I like shoes apparently. I like my NoCal friend too. I know a lot about her. I know she's married. I know she's fun to talk to. I know she likes cool music. What I didn't know, is that she's apparently a nurse in a hospital shoe ward.
"I need peep-toe pumps, stat!"
It's cool we all have our areas of expertise, and areas of concern. I fully expect to be watching the Sci-fi Channel one night. There'll be some demon possessed snake robot horror movie on, staring Dean Cain as a misunderstood hero, Miss April 1996 as the woman who tells him size doesn't matter, and Ron Jeremy, as the snake. They'll cut to a commercial, and my friend will be walking the streets of a third world village of mud huts. "This is Mayla," my friend will say pointing to the emaciated waif keeping pace beside her. "Mayla, used to walk barefoot through these streets, hunting for scraps and rats to eat. Now, thanks to your donations, she's wearing Prada, and she can trade tricks for sandwiches."
Ok, so we need to work on my friends compassion, but her heart's in the right place, I swear. Me? Other than in the middle of my chest I'm not too sure about where my heart is. I mean like I said, I have talents, but sarcasm doesn't win you a humanitarian award.
I like music, but that's not a lot better. Tsking loudly as somebody picks up the latest Hanna Montana CD doesn't really help the world, does it? I suppose I could be more proactive, but I don't see where spraying them in the face with Lysol mace and batting the contaminated disc from their hand is going to help.
I've been accused by people lately of being a good guy, but I'm not so sure where they get that. Altruistic Rob is no more real than Santa's sore sleigh butt. I'm sarcastic. Are they misinterpreting that as "Good guy?"
Ruh-Ro Raggy!
Still, if they see it, doesn't that make it so? Haven't I said that it's all about perception? It worked for MyEx. In our last months I was Ron Jeremy, Robot Snake from Hell! Ok, maybe not the Ron Jeremy part, but the look in her eyes said the names she was thinking weren't good. Then again, she heard the sarcasm. In her defense, the sarcastic smog was pretty thick around that time.
So now I'm going off what she left me with, and I'm trying to understand this new good guy image. I mean, it could be true, but I'm not really familiar with this Rob. My NoCal friend said I should be. After seven hours in shoe triage, she told me that she thought I was sympathetic, and empathetic towards people. I nodded, but she couldn't see it, so I typed, "nodding." She understood. I didn't. I had to look up the two big words. All I knew is that they were partially "pathetic."
Oh she is so gonna get a double dose of sarcasm later!
I looked up the "em" word. The dictionary said, "attribution of feelings to an object." Huh, my monitor looked confused, "You don't do that, Rob." "I know," I said. My shoe friend had been smelling feet again. Then I read the second definition. "Understanding of another's feelings." Well I liked that one better, but was it true? I barely understand my own feelings, how could I understand others?
I suppose I could understand how my friend felt that way. I'm sure I seemed nice. I'd listened to her shoe horror story, and she thought I'd empathized. When we were done talking she was happy. I'm not even sure what I did. I've heard we can be our most helpful when we don't even think about it.
Don't even think about it?
That's the answer!
I never think! I'm more helpful than I thought!
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