Intention

here's an old draft I finished while putting off the short story I should be writing. enjoy. 

Intentions can get you out of quite a pickle.

the irony, of course, being that if your intention is to avoid said pickle, they will likely get you out of absolutely nothing. 

Although I cannot speak for everyone, I find myself focusing on intent more often than not. It sounds sweeter than it is. I mean, sure, it comes in handy when someone makes a mistake around me:

"Oops, sorry, I made your espresso wrong - I'll make it again!"
"I didn't mean to frustrate you."
"Sorry I dragged you to the Tron remake."

On the other hand; I also tend to passively read people and am often deafened by their body language and patterns. Even when this is contrary to their apology:

"Oops, sorry, I didn't mean to bump into you" says the sad man, slithering through the bar. To the woman in a tight dress. Yuck. 

Well if you're going to damn the apologizing party to a non-apology by way of suspicion... you'd better be right. So how does one know when one is right? The truth is: I just know. I go by instinct. When one is to "go by instinct", one will inevitably eventually be incorrect. But so will one who will "go by evidence". I find that reading detective novels / watching movies of the like had taught me that evidence will only take you so far. At some point, you will need to call up your gut instinct. Your ability to read individuals. Because no puzzle is completely solved by using only the scene of the crime. That's why the detectives question everyone. You'd be a pretty silly detective if you simply believed everything everyone told you. You would ask everyone to first see if everything in everyone's story lined up while shortly thereafter considering everyone's body language / inflection / what language they used, etc...

Man I love detective stories. 

At any rate. 

I - selfishly - adore others when they adopt this practice. As long as they're not simply constantly so suspicious of everything that they are never able to read good intentions, that is. Not only because I will then have another brother-in-arms, but also because I know I will be incredibly unlikely to hurt them. I do a lot of strange things and some of them are things I should not be doing. Most of them - by a landslide - are not done with an intention to injure anyone, inside or out. There are some things I just don't get / understand / think about. Not from lack of trying, I can assure you. My intentions are good. And these brother-in-arms types will know that for certain (unless their "guts" are broken) while knowing they can take me at face value. 

And when people in my immediate company do not understand that? Well, that's a different story. You win some, you lose some.