I have a bit less than half an hour before my next event, so I thought I would spend some time chatting with y’all.

Yes, I said y’all. No, I’m not from the American South. I just like the word.

Been pondering my own facet of the “nice guy” paradox. Specifically, the part about what it means to be easygoing.

The thing about being easygoing is that it is defined by an abscence : an abscence of worry, an abscence of stress, and above all, an abscence of demanding, fussy behaviour.

“I’ll have the raspberry. ”
“I’m sorry, we are out of the raspberry. ”
“Really? That’s too bad. Do you have the chocolate?”
“Yes we do. ”
“I’ll have that, then. ”

Stuff like that. I feel genuinely sorry for people whon lack that flexibility. People for whom the lack of raspberry would be extremely upsetting and they would either get mad or get sad.

How can these people live like that? To be clear, I am not implying that they have a choice. We are not all wired the same way and our basic emotional responses are often beyond our control,

But as seen from Mellow Island, it seems quite awful. Such a lack of adaptability seems to me like it makes the person so much poorly adapted to life.

Then again, those people tend to be a lot more ambitious and driven (out of necessity, one would think), so perhaps it is all worth it if it leads to success.

I could never live like that, though. To me, it is sheer madness.

Another thing about being easygoing is that it is largely an invisible virtue, People tend to notice the good things you do, not the bad things you don’t. The only time people notice how easy to get along with I am is when they have been dealing with really difficult people.

Hence my power to attract people who are in unhappy relationships. When you are not getting along with your mate, generally things have become very difficult and stressful and hostile, so an easygoing laid back affectionate person like myself seems like water in the desert.

But no matter how much they appreciate this oasis, they don’t stay there. They go back to their troubled relationship, renewed, or they find someone else with the strength you have lent them.

Because the painful trutg is that being sweet and nice makes people like you, but it does not make them respect you. And without respect, there can be no real love.

So it has been a while since I fell in to that trap. I have grown very good at keeping people at arm’s length online while still being my perky and affectionate fursona. It is sort of sad, but us sensitive types have to guard our hearts.

Unrelatedly, a strange fuzzy logic problem occurred to me recently,

Suppose you have a dog, and one can of dog food. You feed the dog food to the dog.

At what point do you no longer have a can of dog food? The moment the food passes through the dog’s lips? (Dogs have lips, right?) The moment it starts to digest? The moment it finishes digestion? The moment the waste portion is eliminated, thus signaling that the whole thing is now either waste or dog?

Or is that dog food, in a sense, ever gone? That does not seem to make sense either. We defininitely think all the food WE eat as being gone!

It is a classic fuzzy logic problem that illustrates the difference between quantitative and qualitative measures, even in things which seem perfectly quantifiable.

Logic is always weirder than you think.