Give me the opportunity to be nice to you.

[flamingsword]

You all must hate charity, the way you're always talking about not wanting people's charity or to be a charity case. You hate asking for things, hate feeling like you owe gratitude to anybody.

But you must love charity the way you donate to causes, enjoy making things and giving them away, enjoy donating blog time and personal anecdotes and effort to spreading the word when something is going on and people need help.

That is a big old love-hate relationship y'all seem to have going on there. How's that working out for you?

Now, I have a different relationship with the notion myself, and being me I maybe don't have a lot of feelings about it, but let's see how many thoughts I've got:

I enjoy making things, but I've got nowhere to keep them, so I might as well give them away.

We all tend toward accumulating stuff that we don't need and it's pragmatic to swap said stuff around sometimes.

There are a lot of spare moments I have with nothing better to do than signal-boost something, while simultaneously letting you know that I am still alive and that while I'm here I'm not doing anything interesting of my own.

I like asking people for the occasional thing (like candy deliveries) when their effort to accomplish it would be a fraction of my own. I'm proud, but not that proud.

I like validating people with the knowledge that they've given me something that has helped me, that they are useful and appreciated.

I like keeping you guys used to helping me, used to being given things: it keeps our philanthropy muscles toned and svelte and sexy. Like copperbadge says, " Charity is the new black."

I'm getting used to being more vulnerable where people can see it, and so far there's a noticeable lack of douchebags. Part of me keeps waiting for someone to try to get me to accept something I don't want in order to coerce me to give something I don't want, but since I'm giving things away with the expectation that the favor will be paid back into the system and may round-robin it's way to me only eventually, I think that's made it a lot less likely that someone will try to force direct reciprocity.

Those seem to be pretty sensible.