Thanks for smiling buddy

Few things annoy me more than a fake smile. Ironically, I foolish obey the social contrivance all the time. Right, I'm no better. Hate my fake smile right back buddy, just returning the sore favor. It reminds me of talking to the dentist or a sales clerk. I don't care a blip about them and vice versa, but we have to exchange these false smiles. We pretend to treat each other better than I truly act around people I actually know.

Go ahead, accuse me of adapting to "Southern Hospitality" if you will. I'm just being nice I suppose and so is that guy cheesing away at me when we don't even know each other's names. It just rings false. It might be different if we used that smile to jump into a potential relationship rather than a culturally defined and very safe interval of interaction before absolute separation forevermore. There's no real point to it. I guess it makes some people happy. Maybe I have grown tired of flexing my cheek muscles in reaction to the appearance of co-workers, neighbors, strangers, etc.

Yeah well, the alternative is that we just stare at each other for the brief interaction before we part ways. Does that make me a bad person? Or just a social misfit? Sometimes, however, I have wondered if our ever increasingly distanced culture will progress to total lack of bodily contact and facial mannerisms in the future. Hugging nixed in favor of text messaging and so on. Who knows? I'll be too old and set in my ways by that point that I'll be cheesing at some young guy who goes home to complain about my niceties in his blog.