And niceness, or not, stream of consciousness, sort of, and words I like

David over at Wandering Aimlessly has given me a shiny bit of blog bling meant to suggest that I am nice. Or, as he puts it, that I am nice in spite of myself, which conjures up images of me wishing I were a heartless monster but constantly thwarted by my own niceness. What a heartwarming children's book I might make if this were true.

My initial thought was: "This amuses me" as I stroked a white Persian cat in a sumptuous chair, pressing a mysterious red button on the desk in front of me in my underground lair. "It serves my purposes to be thought of as nice. Soon, I shall initiate Phase Three."

To undermine the whole idea even further, I waited for more than a week before responding to the tag. Apologies.

And I recalled my friend Suzi, during my sojourn among the Workers, saying once: "You're very nice...on your blog."

I suppose debating my niceness is now irrelevant, since I have a badge that says it is so. Who can refute such a thing? Only getting tagged with a "Not at all nice" award can reopen the topic.

Still, perhaps, open for debate is the niceness of the Cheshire Cat, who seems to be depicted in the artwork.

And I think of the drummer in a short-lived band I had formed during my exile in Colorado. I pulled him aside after a rehearsal to ask him to consider being less confrontational when suggesting things to myself and the others in the band. "I'm a fucking pussycat," he informed me. "You have no idea how nice I'm being."

Niceness, then, being a relative concept. Like everything else.

I was called "nice" a fair amount in high school as well. This was probably true enough, but the subtext of some of these declarations was "I do not want to date you." It took me a while afterward to take nice as a compliment.

And, portraits of myself as a Bond villain aside, it truly does suit my purposes to be thought of as nice. I would vastly prefer that my friends think so, that they look at me as someone who would be there should they need an ear, a ride, whatever. Not money, of course, but other stuff.

So I am nice, and you are nice, too, Blogreader. You click in here and read my thoughts and sometimes you click in here again to find out more. That means an awful lot to me.

Passing it on... I hate passing things on. And mostly I do not, but this is one of those memes which tricks you by being an honor and not passing it on would make me into the antithesis of the award I was given. Possibly the universe would then explode, or implode, or fold in on itself and I really don't want that on my conscience.

I should say, of course, that all of the people in my blogroll are nice, or they would not be there. I should say and I do say, because it happens to be true. But the three below are the ones who leaped into my mind most readily as being deserving of special praise. Aside, of course, from David himself, Hearts in San Francisco (who tagged him and who is herself most deserving of the award), and those David mentioned alongside my name in his post. Nice folks all.

Verillion is über-nice. She's enthusiastic and cheerful and a great friend to this blog. There should be more folks like her out there. Or at least she should leave France and roam the globe, spreading her nice-osity to the various peoples of the world. Oh, and I'm sure she'd like it if I called her a bloggeague somewhere in here.

Minx is nice in the way that I am nice, I suspect: she still bites when provoked. Once befriended or bribed, however, she is an excellent person (for a Limey). An enthusiastic and ardent supporter of fellow writers, she has taken it upon herself to nurture those of us who still wobble around on fawn legs. I cannot imagine how much of her time she has given to this. Lots and lots, I suppose. She's even read some of my fiction, the poor thing.

Rich is brand new to blogging, but is hands-down one of the nicest humans I have had the pleasure of meeting. Go and say hello. It will confuse him. I believe this is his first "award," and since he has only given us five posts so far, I hope he will not be crestfallen should his posts/awards ratio decrease. I'd be pretty surprised if he responds to this by passing the thing on to other bloggers, since David and I seem to be the only people in his links section, but his niceness should not pass unmarked.

(For Moon Topples trivia fans, Rich was the person I had in mind when I initially started this blog. We didn't get to stay in touch as often as we once had, and I thought I would write various funny things here, and then he would write various funny things back. This was not, obviously, the path the blog took, but I am delighted to see him making a go at blogging himself.)

Trying to say thanks to David in my own small way, I would like to steal pay tribute to one of his semi-regular features and give you a list of some words I like. I selected 20 words more or less at random from my brain. I can detect no pattern other than that I don't get much of a chance to use any of these. They just don't come up a lot in my normal writing. Except maybe "tetchy."

dalliance
mollify
languid
luminous
surreptitious
countenance
rebuke
stipulate
penitent
ineffable
abattoir
kindle
joint
epithet
frisson
tetchy
plangent
polymath
maven
swollen