Paying it forward.

A while back I saw the movie 'Pay it forward', based on the same named novel from Catherine Ryan Hyde. The movie is about a 12-year old boy who wants to change the world by doing three good deeds. In return he asks the favor of 'paying' the good deed 'forward'. I think you can see where this is going.

It didn't make me thinking right away, but last week I thought that I had to be a good person too! So I started to think about the things I could do. I was going to start with elderly people, and it didn't took long before I was going to do my very first good deed!
Across the street was a 147-year old woman struggling with her limbs. I ran to her, wrapped my arms around her and carried her to the other side of the street. When we arrived I told her she had to do something good for three other people because I helped her. She was apocalyptic furious! She called me names, that were really insulting when we'd lived in 1884. I ran away, before she'd bite my head off with one of her three teeth.

It wasn't easy so far, so I came up with a new idea. Why don't I just do things that I normally don't? And again, it didn't took long before I had a chance. Two parking maids walked towards me and I stopped them. I told them I wasn't going to call them 'parking-nazis' this time, so now they'd have to do three other people a favor. This was easy!
Unfortunately they threatened to call the police, get me arrested and then get me quartered or hung or whatever that's normal these days.

Obviously this wasn't a success as well, so I had to come up with something else. I couldn't think of anything until I was in the local supermarket. I was standing in line with my roommate and behind us was a boy with only a bottle of milk. So far so good, but we had a shopping trolley with groceries for 17 months. I told him that he could stand in front of us, and then it happened. He looked surprised, my roommate looked surprised, the people before us looked suprised, the cashier looked surprised and even I was surprised. I did a good deed! In all our joy I forgot to tell him to pay it forward, but it didn't matter. I'm a good person now. No, wait... I'm a great person!

J&R