Sometime in the mid 90's I started saying "sorry you sneezed" instead of one of the more traditional responses when someone around me had in fact just sneezed. I did it half just to be a punk and mess with people, half because it's kind of funny, and half because being expected to say something else is pretty retarded. And 150% reasoning for doing something is always better than simply 100%.

Just now a lady at the grocery story demanded I explain myself when she sneezed and I said "Sorry you sneezed" to her. She was apparently put off that I didn't say something about god to her. Everyone knows that when someone sneezes around you it's generally considered good manors to say "god bless you" or just "bless you" if you are into the whole brevity thing. "Gesundheit" is also used but most people just assume that's German for one of the previous statements. Of course this comes from the crazy superstitious belief that evil spirits are being forced out of the body when you sneeze. I doubt most people who say it today think that on any level but that's where it all started. So what if you or the person who sneezed doesn't believe in god? Or that evil spirits are being forced out of you by sneezing for that matter? So I asked this lady what she would have preferred I said and I should have said "god bless you." I asked her why? "Because that's just what you do" was the only thing she could come up with.

I told her that I didn't believe in god, nor that evil spirits had just been forced out of her body by the sneeze and didn't see why I should be expected to, without any prior conversation with her, make judgments on which particular fairy tails she happens to subscribe to or for that matter why I should have to write off my own convictions to get in line with hers "just because." I was expecting the same kind of shitty reaction I've gotten a few times in the past on this one but I was actually surprised when she paused and said that I'd just made a really good argument about it and she wondered if she'd offended other people in the past by saying "god bless you" to them and they'd just been to polite to tell her about it. She ended the conversation noting that she'd been saying "god bless you" for close to 60 years and had never thought about why she was saying it, and honestly probably wouldn't stop just because it was such a habit but she'd definitely think of this conversation next time she said it and confided in me that while she was a firm believer in god she didn't think evil spirits were being forced out of her when she sneezed either.