Day 179

Every rejection from a girl, notice of termination, and otherwise similar gesture of "I don't want you around anymore" has begun with a series of compliments, and usually ends with more compliments. We're taught this as debate tournament judges, always to sandwich every criticism between compliments.

But that's for high schoolers. Now that we're adults, the whole exercise just seems facetious to me, and thorougly useless when it comes to mitigating the disappointment. And what's more, I find it downright confusing. Sometimes I just want to write the girl who said no (via email)back and say "well if you have all these nice things to say about how great I am then why are you saying no??"

Because, either they're just being polite (aka dishonest), or they're pretty much contradicting themselves. Same thing with my old employer Denny's, who fired me for, no kidding, stealing a bowl of cold cereal. "Jared I hate to do this, you're one of our best employees..."

"Well why would you fire one of your best emloyees?" And there really is no good answer.

Come to think of it, "polite" and "dishonest" are almost synonyms. Most of the time, the whole and only point of being polite is to cover up, or avoid telling the (usually unpleasant) truth of things.

Comments

Anonymous said…
But you have to wonder if they're being so polite for your feelings, or theirs. I've gone through the same thing recently, and I think it's really just so THEY don't feel so bad. Personally I'd rather a much more straight forward approach, even nice lies just get in the way.
12:16 AM
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