Do you hate me?

Social dynamics have always been a funny thing to me; often I find my way of thinking is much different when compared to others. For the most part I have always tried to be nice. I figured that since I liked being treated nicely everyone else would. This theory worked satisfactorily, people just didn't seem to respond the way I had expected. People have always teased me, and I realize that I am no different from anyone else; everyone gets teased. What makes me different from the next person is how I interpreted the teases. I never really knew how to interpret them. Everyone always complimented me on how light-hearted I was; they often said it was amazing how much teasing I would take and brush off without saying a word. I was never really frustrated by peoples misinterpretation of my feelings. What frustrated me was, why was it so hard for me to comfortably interact with others. When interacting with others, I most frequently respond nicely, because I figure that is what most people would like. As mentioned previously, my results with this strategy were satisfactory at best.

These details made me think that, perhaps people could be put off by others who seem "overly" nice; as if thinking to themselves, "why could this person possibly be acting so nice." It is as if people have an alarm in the back of their heads that sounds when others are being overly nice. They just back off and cut you out, they no longer trust you.

Last Friday I went to a show that my friend was hosting at a local bar. My friend and I have very many friends in common, resultantly there were many people who I knew present. One of these people I met early on in the night and decided to try and interact with her atypically. In stead of constantly being nice, I made fun of her a bit. I said many things that I would usual deem insulting. She reacted positively; I couldn't believe it, she reacted more positively then anytime I had been nice to her. Over the coarse of the night I sporadically would poke fun at her to see how it would go over. After each she would seemingly come back faster then the last. She sought my attention that night bore then ever before.

This leads me to a potential theory, a theory which I am going to call the Stop Light (SL) theory. I call it the SL theory because of the way people stop positively interacting with you when you act "overly" nice. One possible explanation to this theory is that people are suspicious of others who are "overly" nice. Through my quest to find the acceptable amount of niceness to great others with, I have found that this stop light does not go off consistently. The stop light is completely unpredictable and you have to be on your toes to catch it going off.

Missing this light has a reaction similar to missing a stop light in car. There is going to be a collision; which leads the driver into thinking that there is something wrong with you. The more times you make this mistake, the more readily your assumed guilty of other faults. Be careful not to miss those stop lights because sooner or later you not going to be permitted to drive up to them. If you find this confusing than don't even think about starting from that red light, starting before a green lights repercussions will be just as severe as missing a red, if not worse.

Those who have trouble catching these lights are called poor drivers. As mentioned earlier I am a satisfactory driver, I frequently come on too nice, missing the red light and deeming myself untrustworthy. I don't know of any tricks that help identify red lights faster. To my understanding these social "stop lights" are random at best, with no "right" technique for fast identification. The only real way to figure it out is by trying other methods, which I will hopefully be able to find.

Later Days

Tim