I don't care.

[clockworkpixel]

[this is seperate from my earlier long post, just to keep things clear]

"Why is it that people can't seem to understand that when I say 'I don't care.' what I actually mean is 'I don't care.'
It may be a 'All option are great/mediocre/bad, so any one would be great/mediocre/bad.' sort of 'I don't care.', or it might be a 'I'm too tired to care.' sort of 'I don't care.', or it might be a 'I can not be bothered to give a shit at this time.' sort of 'I don't care.', or sometimes it's even a 'I'm really depressed so everything is shit, and any of those options will be equal amounts of shit, but no more or less shit than sitting here and staring at the wall.' sort of 'I don't care.'
But all of those types all work out to 'I don't care.' anyway.
Yet almost every time someone asks me something and I say 'I don't care.' they ask me over and over again which one I want, and get offended when I say 'I don't care.'. Or worse they try and pawn the decision off on me, so we do the 'Do you want fu or bar?' 'I don't care.' 'No really, which one do you want?' 'I don't care.' 'Well I want you to make a decision.'
If I don't care I'm obviously not the one to be making the decision. What makes it worse is I'll just pick one at random to get it over with and half the time they'll comment and/or whine about how they wanted the other option.
Or they do the 'Do you want fu or bar?' 'I don't care.' 'What do you mean you don't care?' 'I mean that I don't care., then I get some varient of 'Well you must have an opinion.' or 'Why don't you care?'. the one universal I've discovered in this direction of conversation is the one thing guaranteed to get them incerdibly pissed is to be 100% honest and tell them which variety of 'I don't care.' it is.

Maybe 'I don't care.' is too compicated and I need to come up with something simpler. But I can't figure out how to get it much simpler. Perhaps I can use 'I do not care.', it adds a word, but makes them all one sylable."

Comments

Re: Attendez vous! Lecture erumpant.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I think this is exactly what I was referring to above. that conversation didn't go anywhere because you dodged the responsibility for making the decision without actually throwing it back into her court and asking her to make the decision.

I think the above lecture was relevant in one way - "I don't care" indicates, to the listener, a complete lack of interest in ALL options. Though in this case I suppose you probably weren't terribly interested in mowing the lawn either day. Still, you were at least willing to do it, so saying something like "I am willing to do it today, or tomorrow, or this weekend" would be more positive and less likely to annoy the person asking. I know, that's a terribly lot of words to have to expend on something one doesn't care about :)

Re: Attendez vous! Lecture erumpant.

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

What she said.