So the other day, I’m leading our Ladies Room group (it’s like affective ed. for teenage girls) and a student says, “Yeah, this white girl…” and I say, “Hey! There’s a white girl in the room!” Without missing a beat, she says, “Oh phst, Miss, you black!”
And then my heart swelled with some kind of pride, like I was an honorary member of the Black & Brown Ladies Club, at least in my classroom.
Another student (same school, different kid) said I was ‘two per cent nigga’. A few years ago, my Latino ESL students proclaimed me an Honorary Mexican (they would not, however, issue me a visa, in the name of fairness. ;)).
I know these are compliments, but I would have never thought of them as such until hearing them.
I remember when I was dating my son’s father and he said something like, “I love watching you wash the dishes,” when I was cleaning up after lunch. Now, commenting on a woman cleaning in the kitchen usually gets a frown, but what he was really saying was, “I love watching you do normal everyday things in your normal everyday life because I love you.”
Anyone else get a ‘weird’ compliment you wouldn’t have thought of? (Or weird to you?) They aren’t backwards compliments, exactly ("…for a girl…") - they’re the kind of compliment that could be taken as an insult if put into another context? There’s nothing demeaning about it at all, it’s just an odd one?
My wife and her long-time friend were reminiscing about a rock concert they attended years ago. My wife said “Wasn’t that the show where the girl a few rows up got nailed in the head with a thrown lemon or something?”. Her friend replied that it was an orange and went on how she remembered the smell of the residue and the color and everything. She was sure it was an orange.
At this moment I stepped in and said “You have a great memory for citrus”.
I was recently told by an absolutely adorable young waitress at my favored drinking establishment that I am the cutest, sexiest man she knows that is older than her dad, and that she thinks I should meet her mom.
Yesterday at Wendy’s a guy who might have been insane or on drugs came in and made it obvious that he knew the countergirl.
When she turned to make someone’s order ready he said “She’s my girlfriend, even though she’s married. Isn’t she cute? She’s beautiful, she reminds me of my hamster.”
I spent many weekends last summer exhibiting and selling my photographs at outdoor art shows. At one show a woman spent perhaps five or six minutes looking closely and intently at each of the 30 or so framed pictures, then looked up at me standing just outside the booth.
“I love your signature,” she said, then walked off.
She never lies. Not even white lies. But even when she’s telling you something you’d rather not hear you know she’s not judging and she really likes you anyway.
At the end of a long, frustrating day, my boss turned to me and said, “I can’t wait until you’re on [that other] team.”
The catch was that the other team was designing software my team was using, and doing a poor job – he wanted to get me over there so I’d be better placed to give input / effect change.
The first time I met my father-in-law, he hugged me and said to my husband, “Boy, I do believe that this is the biggest woman I’ve ever seen you with. Ya can’t even feel her ribs when ya hug 'er!”
As part of marriage counseling many years ago, my (now ex-) husband had the assignment of giving me at least three compliments a day. I had not lost all of the weight yet after having a baby, and was sensitive about it. We were working in the yard and I was sweating like crazy. His idea of a compliment, said with complete sincerity:
