I was already offline for the night when this line of thought started to pester me again, for the second time in a few days, so I logged back in to write about it.

A while ago, when finishing up work at about 2 a.m., several of my co-workers were having one of those loud, extremely marginal conversations. Dirty jokes, off-colour references to each others' personal lives, all that sort of thing. The group consisted of three men and two women, ages ranging from maybe early 20s to late 40s, married and single. While I wouldn't describe any of them as close friends, they were all people I know pretty well on a work basis. Anyway.

I had been off a little way, doing something else, but able to listen in on the conversation. Some of it was pretty funny. After a while my work took me back to the group; somebody had just said something which I found very, very funny, so I laughed along with the rest of them.

When they realised I had heard, they all *apologised* to me, looked embarrassed, and the conversation died stone dead in about four seconds flat. This struck me as odd, since I had been laughing at the joke along with the rest of them. Later, I spoke to one of the women from the group and asked her why everybody seemed to think I would be offended. To my surprise, she apologised *again* for the crudity of the conversation and said, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, "You're not the sort of person who likes that sort of thing. You're a Nice Girl."

I suppose I should be happy that people think of me this way. Instead, I find it depressing. What's the point of being nice when people say "nice" like it's an insult? Nobody asks the "nice" people to their parties, or wants to get together with them after work. What makes it stranger is that I don't even think I *am* particularly nice, although I'm not off the other end of the scale either. I'm virtually unoffendable on any topic, I'm not very strait-laced or conservative, and I have a good sense of humour. I'm just ... not the sort of person anybody wants around when they're having fun.

I feel completely confounded by what people want socially. And it drives me nuts that, at my age, I'm finding myself back in exactly the same situation I always hated at school, lurking around by myself on the fringes of everything. I thought I had come such a long way since then -- I'm not shy, and I have normal-to-good conversational ability. I guess I thought wrong.

Brunnen-"also, I'm telling this to a group of online friends. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic"G