Mea Culpa–Too Much My Bad Is Not Good

The other day I signed off on an email by writing “take care.”

Apparently, that didn’t go over so well for this person who wrote back asking that I please never use that expression with her again. In effect, she was saying that it was a meaningless gesture that you might equate with saying “be safe.”

You could ask, be safe? From what? Being hit by a bus?

If you’ll pardon the expression, it appears lots of people also don’t like hearing “have a good one” or “have a nice day.”

If someone takes offense when I say “make it a great day,” I’ll apologize. To use the more hip, present-day vernacular, it’s my bad.

Let’s explore a little more on how my bad got started.

Some time ago, I was born and began suckling on a plastic baby bottle. Back then, we had no idea how the chemicals in plastics were despoiling the planet and how the plastic was made of fossil fuels that we didn’t know could be so dangerous.

If I knew then what we know now, I would have also gone cold turkey off baby bottles and switched to suckling on something less harmful such as straws. Wait a minute, they’ve also got plastic, so that’s out too.

Perhaps what would have worked best was to just chug down the baby formula straight like I later did with a glass of milk. Oh, forget milk. We hear today milk also is not so great for the environment. Especially almond milk. That milk uses lots of water. With so much drought occurring around the world, especially in California, my sincere apologies to Californians and anybody else for drinking so much milk when I was a kid not realizing that I was drying up Los Angeles and causing all those terrible wildfires. But again, not all my fault, nobody told me it was wrong.

My bad also included lots of other nasty things I was forced to participate in when I was 9 or 10 or so such as giving a piano recital where my parents and everybody else in the audience had to fake that I was any good. It wasn’t totally my doing, you see, that I was contributing to an equally dangerous form of pollution to the planet, noise pollution. For which I now promise to never again pretend to be another Liberace.

But I’m not the only one who started saying my bad for an offense, unintentional or not. I’ll never forget the incident when an elderly lady reached out to straighten out the flap on the back pocket of my cargo pants. At least it was the flap that was sticking out that she straightened and not something like a big blubbery posterior, even if I wasn’t even aware of what she was doing until she brought it to my attention by crying out, “It’s my OCD. Sometimes it gets out of control. My bad. Can you forgive me?”

Yes, I did, because I’d been in her shoes. Well, not exactly the same shoes because I told her she was wearing very nice designer ones like Gucci or Stuart Weitzman. But that was totally the wrong thing for me to say because I ignored my mother’s advice that a man should never comment to a woman on what she is wearing unless she mentions it first. So even if what I said to her was bad, she started this whole darn flap. Okay?

Which brings me to my final observation about over-saying my bad. Probably the most important one. What I’ve learned from all my prior transgressions of saying have a nice day, take care, or stay safe is that it might come off sounding insincere or inauthentic. Much better would it be if I avoided using all that phony baloney. Right?

So the next time someone hears from me, who knows, I’ll have mastered the art of not signing off with “Have a Good One.” Which can’t be all bad.

 

Eric Green is a notorious humor writer with his free-lance articles appearing in Points in Case, Humor Times, the Washington Post, Oddball Magazine, and elsewhere. His latest short story, “A Marriage Made in Heaven,” was published by the Hudson Valley (New York) Writers Guild.