Laurabelle's Blog

Nice is an interesting word. It has many different connotations and meanings, and I’m not just talking about Agnes Nutter. For my grandmother, who thought niceness was very important, I think it meant polite. For me, it sometimes meant someone who lets me do whatever I want, until I realized how absurd that was.

I used to think I wasn’t a nice person. This probably had several causes, part of which was that I was severely unpopular among my peers at school, so I didn’t learn normal social skills. Or something. My mother said things like that she was surprised that I had any friends since I treated people so badly. While possibly true, comments of that nature did much harm and no good, because they didn’t help me improve my behavior and were destructive to what little self-esteem I had. On the other hand, I don’t know what she should have done instead.

I don’t quite know why I was so difficult to get along with. It’s hard to describe, especially since I’m still the same person I was ten years ago. I’m more civilized now, but the credit for much of that goes to my junior-high best friend Al, who has the patience of a saint.

Eventually, in college, I had a little argument with my now ex-boyfriend
Kevin about whether I was a nice person or not. He said I was, but I
maintained that I was mean and nasty. I mentioned this to another friend,
Adrian Morgan, and he agreed with Kevin. To prove his point, he created
a little image for my desktop wallpaper. Later, when I wanted my own domain and need a name, the obvious ones were taken, and Adrian suggested laurabelleisaniceperson.org, and though I scorned it initially, it started to grow on me, especially in truncated form. It is less a proclamation of my niceness than a reminder of those who are nice enough to be my friends and to defend me against myself.

I still don’t think that I’m as kind or polite all the time as I should be. I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut when someone’s spouting nonsense or when my time is being wasted. But on the other hand, I treat people with respect (until I feel that they have treated me with disrespect) and try my best to do the right thing.

While on the equestrian team at MHC, I was a bit afraid of the administrative assistant in the Equestrian Center. I can’t remember her name now, but I remember being nervous because she was a little bit gruff. However, she was efficient and not unsympathetic (under the bristles), and I commented to a friend that there are a couple of kinds of niceness. There’s the soft, personable, make-people-feel-good nice, and there’s the get-things-done-for-people nice. This woman wasn’t the first kind, but she had the second kind all over.

I try my best to cover both those kinds of nice, especially when responding to KCLS patrons’ questions. They write in about the difficulties they’ve been having with the catalog, and I attempt to explain the situation and the solution without implying that it’s the patron’s fault for not understanding or for doing something wrong. (No joke: I had two unrelated patrons write in because they had misspelled Spongebob Squarepants and were therefore not finding any results in the catalog. I don’t blame them, because I wasn’t sure how to spell it either, but I found it slightly tricky to frame my response so that I didn’t seem to imply ha ha, you can’t even spell spongebob.) It’s about solving their problems, if possible. It’s also about helping them to feel that they have been heard and that something has been accomplished, even if the problem isn’t really solved.

This is approximately what nice means to me right now, but that will probably change.