The Wrong Thing Society

 Annamaria on Monday

During several of the many decades that I have been racking up, David and I and three of our fiends had a standing date to get together once a month.  One of our habitual outings was what we called "Mystery Dinner." Each of us found, somewhere in the five boroughs of New York, a restaurant that we were sure none of the others had ever hear of.  We searched out good places, many of them local neighborhood favorites that were unknown to folks who lived more than eight blocks away.  Typically, we began those meetings at David's and my house for an aperitif and then set out in our car for the destination eatery.  What fun.

Perhaps the novelty was wearing off Mystery Din, or maybe we were just ready for a new excuse for our regular meetings.  But at the last of those jaunts, we came up with the another excuse that also involved good food and great conversation.

As it happened, at what turned out to be our last mystery dinner, one of the men was dealing with the difficult family member.  Our discussion of his trials and tribulations concluded with an admission from all of us had we shared an unhealthy compulsion to ALWAYS do what we SHOULD do, and never shirk such activities in favor of what we would find comfortable, or self satisfying instead of self sacrificing.

After that dinner, I thought a lot about the effect of such behaviors on our individual well-being.  Certainly, we should all be doing the right thing a lot of time.  But always?  Never letting it slide?  Never choosing "want to" over "should?"

When we met the following month, we agreed: we needed to support each other in learning to say, at least to ourselves, "Yes but...  I don't want to."

And so The Wrong Thing Society was born.

I designed a membership card.  I was inspired to write about this blog today because, while looking for something else entirely, I came across my souvenir membership card this past week.

In those times, every mattresses and pillow came with the tag that looked like this:

They were printed with warnings, some of which said "Do not remove under penalty of law." Or at the very least "NOT to be removed except by the consumer."  Since I don't think any of us would be consuming a mattress, it seemed a good place to practice doing the wrong thing.

So, instead of "Mystery Dinner," that next month, I sent each of my cohorts an invitation to the first meeting of The Wrong Thing Society.  Their ticket to the event was to bring with them such a tag that they themselves had torn off a mattress or pillow that they had no intention of consuming.

After that, we met every few months for a dinner where each of us was honor bound (??!!) to come up with a true story recounting how we had done the wrong thing at least once since the last meeting.

I can't say any of us substantially change behaviors, but at least we thought about it.