Are You Good? (Max in Real Life)

Only a few days left to nominate me and my blogging buddies for the Black Weblog Awards...have you done it yet?

Last night I got the words "I am bad" tattooed on my back. I meant it in the Run DMC sense rather than the literal sense and if you don't know what that means get off my blog and never come back but still when I looked at it this morning it seemed...a little wrong. In a way I felt like having that sentence permanently etched on me was equal to publicly declaring that I'm not a good person. But am I?

Every Sunday I wake up with the intention to go to church. Sometimes I make it, moretimes I spend the church hour doing my nails writing blog posts about sex and abusing my body by stuffing it full of homefries and nicotine. So am I a good person because I believe in God enough to want to go to church? Or am I a bad person because I never rarely go?

I'm a generous person, I work hard to be considerate and invested in people's lives. But I'm also unfriendly and can be selfish...at least if you subscribe to the theory that ignoring my friends' phone calls equals selfish. I try to let the people I care about feel cared for but I also live a pretty hedonistic lifestyle and shun long-lasting connections with people. I have great sympathy for many causes but can rarely rouse myself to do anything altruistic to help them.

Am I a good person? Sometimes I can't tell.

I mean - I think I am, but who ever really believes they are a bad person? And what does being a good person even mean? I used to know a man who I described as "a really good guy with really bad behaviour" until a friend of mine said that you can't divorce one's behaviour from one's character...if you act badly you're bad. At the time it struck me as really strident but then again at the end of the day what do we really have to go on in our relationships but how the person acts toward us?

This is something that I work around in my brain endlessly, so I thought I'd share it with you guys to see if anyone else out there thinks about this. So tell me, the pitiful few of you who comment on Thursdays dear readers, what does being a good (or bad) person mean to you? Which do you consider yourself? And can we change from one to the other or are our positions on the good-bad spectrum set in stone? Are goodness and badness functions of our behaviour or what lies beneath? Speak on it in the comments.