RAOO #2

Today I returned to the scene of my previous Random Act of Oddness. I was greeted warmly and with enthusiasm (still with the slanty-eyed sideways look).

Apparently I "made the lady's day" yesterday, and she vowed as she left the cafe to "do something nice for someone else". Clair tells me that I am very kind and nice. And that there's quite a lot of niceness going around and she thinks it might have something to do with the recession. She hopes 'it' comes back to me tenfold. "Oddness?" I think to myself, "...can the world cope if it is multiplied by 10? Or does she mean 'to the power of ten'?!".

I found this conversation quite interesting really, mostly because I really wasn't intending to be kind. Rather I've approached this as an experiment. Really. How does the human mind respond to stimuli that is out of the ordinairy? What happens if a stranger is kind? Do we return that to the person or do we hug it to ourselves? Do we pass it on "tenfold"? Or do we just take it as our right? Does it REALLY make the world a better place? Or does it drop into the huge lake of our life and disappear beneath the surface, never to appear again? I've been told that one of my "problems" is that I am too generous. This also puzzles me. Does generosity result in meanness? And in what forms?

Today I asked Clair to give the next coffee to a bloke. And to wait until I had left (for some reason, paying for a coffee made me feel guilty. Almost as if I was swinging my wallet around, randomly asking "so do you come here often?" and leering suggestively at passers by. I think it's because the random recipient is also being given my superhero card. This doesn't seem rational, so I'm just going to go with the flow until I receive evidence otherwise).

Anyways, one thing I did notice was that despite the fact that I've been all in my head about this 'experiment', it made me smile when Clair said nice things. And I certainly had a jaunty walk as I left the cafe. Being kind and nice makes me feel good apparently.