I want to be a mean person but I am a nice person. My parents raised me to be nice, and as far as I can tell, they succeeded. Relevant maxims: Mean people suck; Nice guys finish last. I choose to suck.

What is a mean person? There is no such thing as a “mean person,” just like there is no such thing as a “happy person.” People are different depending on the situation and the people around them. When I say a mean person, I am referring to a person that uses meanness to achieve a goal. I am not thinking of the person who kicks cats or tortures children.

Speaking of kicking cats, a mean person is not the same as an evil person, just like a nice person is not the same as a good person. Nicety relates to social graces, and good and evil relate to morality. A nice person is more likely to be a good person, but there is probably only a weak relationship between the two concepts. Imagine a mean person using her cruelty to obtain donations for a charity: ‘If you do not donate, you will kill poor, defenseless children. Do you even think about the children? You will give to my charity or your neighbors will know what an uncaring bitch you are.’ While this mean approach might or might not obtain more donations than a nicer approach, the mean person using this approach could be using it for a good end. Therefore, she is, under most definitions of morality, a good person, but she isn’t a nice person.

Meanness, therefore, is a social attitude. Some synonyms for mean: unkind, malicious, cruel, bad-tempered, nasty, unpleasant.

Most of the mean people I have as friends are lawyers. The funny thing about their meanness is that they achieve amazing things by being mean. If asked, they would claim that they are demanding, not mean. But there is little difference between the two. The way I measure meanness is how others look at that person. If they are disliked after an interaction, then that person is mean. These same friends are not mean to me, or I would not be their friend. They are mean to select persons, usually underlings or those that they don’t respect.

What is interesting about a mean person is that their victims respect them. Their victims do not like them, and might even fear them, but they do respect them. And this respect gets the mean person what they want. Their demands do not even have to be rational. They get ahead using this strange logic: a mixture of assertiveness, reputation, and meanness.

I’ve noticed two things about meanness: First, within every nice person, there is a mean person lurking, waiting for the right opportunity to strike out and take advantage of a situation. And second, it is so easy to be a mean person to those that you love, and so much work to be a mean person to those that you don’t know.

Yesterday, I was writing about Good Things. I was saying that not playing video games is a Good Thing. After returning from the gym yesterday, I was tempted to play video games. I was thwarted, of course, by having destroyed the video game CD. This allowed me to find alternatives to my addictions. Regrettably, I was not able to translate my free time into much more productive ends. I wrote a few paragraphs before the pull of a DVD dragged me into media oblivion.

I finished How to Be Good during my non-video game time yesterday. It was wholly satisfying and a quick read (as one of the helpful reviewers commented on the back of the book. Why they would pick that reviewer’s comment as a selling point for this book is beyond me). The story is simple: the narrator is in an unhappy marriage with her husband. They have two kids. She has an affair and wants a divorce, and then doesn’t. The husband learns of the affair and wants her to leave. He visits a mystical healer for back problems and comes back a different person who wants to do Good. He invites the mystical healer, a healing hippie, to move in and hilarity ensues. There is more of this, but the theme and writing, which is all internal thought and dialogue, makes this a good book.

The theme relates to doing Good (he, like David Foster Wallace, is a big fan of capitalizing phrases—this is pretty popular on the Internet as well, but Internet posters add the ™ at the end for an even cleverer affect). The questions the book asks is at what point do you sacrifice your own happiness to do Good? Nick Hornby does not have the narrator provide any answers, but she does conclude that family happiness is more important than universal happiness.

What does this have to do with being a mean person? I have no idea. There’s another secret to my new musing style: it doesn’t always have to make sense. So, fuck off.

(Okay, I apologize for that. I was trying to be a mean person, but I felt guilty as soon as I wrote it and wanted your approval. Please don’t think any less of me. I’m really a nice person. Really. That’s why I finish last. See, there’s the finish line, and there are all the runners that finished ahead of me. I just hope there’s still a crowd to see me limp across the line.)