A LITTLE ROUGHHOUSE | 2008-01-15
A Little Roughhouse
When I was in grad school one of my buddies asked me, "Bob, are you pissed off at me?"
I replied, "No, why would you think that?"
He said, "You've been awfully NICE to me lately."
He knew very well that I roughhouse with my friends, but I am coldly polite to people I don't care for.
More than one person has said to me, upon meeting me for the first time, "I would have recognized you! You talk the same way you write." This is true of almost all professional writers. It took YEARS to learn to write conversationally.
How many times have you heard someone say, "I can explain what I mean, but when I sit down to write it, it just won't come out the way I SAY it."
So here it takes a little getting used to when I say things that you wouldn't take seriously if I were talking to you as friend to friend. Most people expect that difference between the politeness in writing and the informal way we talk on the porch.
For instance, when Pain was talking about organizing my writings today, he said,
"A commenter scraped out Bob's junk, meaning we have preserved it for posterity."
Now this is not the way someone who is trying to preserve the pprecious Wisdom of the Prophet Bobodophilus would write elsewhere. But Pain and I are not thin-skinned. We are comrades.
I am only nice to the ladies, because that is the way it should be. But I kid them, too.
I am only really nice to guys I dislike.