Don't be a jerk. This is how.

This post would be written by Leigh, if she weren't busy cleaning. I'm visiting her, and we just had a little mishap that she insists I need to blog about. She even gave me the title, so how could I turn her down?

Leigh lives in an apartment this year, and she and her three apartment-mates have really taken to decorating. As we were working on putting a pretty black ribbon around the top of the living room walls (to imitate crown molding, apparently), a cactus managed to basically frisk me. It caught the inside of the back of my shorts and pulled itself over, right up and out of the pot. It's a little cactus, kind of round, the size of a baseball, maybe. Still, it spilled dirt. After controlling my giggles, I crouched down to help Leigh reset the poor little guy and replace his dirt and...

I really knocked the whole thing over. This time, almost all of the dirt spilled out of the little pot, and more got on the carpet. I plopped down where I was and said, "Okay, that's it, not touching that cactus anymore!" Leigh sent me after the little vacuum cleaner, and I cleaned up the dirt around the floor while she once again reinstated our cactus friend.

Leigh says, "See? I could have gotten mad. It could have messed up our morning. But I just gave you another job to do that really did need to be done. I worked around it."

She thinks some people in my life need to learn this lesson about trying to work with me, and I agree. Rather than insisting I (or anyone!) do things I can't do, give me a job I can do just fine. Don't get angry, or "don't be a jerk," as Leigh says. Not everything has to be a big deal.