Yes, I have been aware of the upside of manipulation for several years, now. I am a writer (or like to think that I am, anyway), and writing is a form of manipulation. Do I want you to cry? Well, do you want to cry? Doesn't matter. You have chosen to read my very sad book in which a puppy dies a horrible death, and a child is abandoned at Disneyland, and the hero leaps from a tiled roof to sweep his loved one out of the path of the runaway train, only to be smashed to bits when--after depositing her safely on a large tree branch--he is unable to halt his back swing and is obliterated by the same train. When your tears trickle from eye to chin, you will have been manipulated. Is this a bad thing? Presumably, it is not. Sure, perhaps you picked up my book, titled Every Sad Thing in the Universe Working as One, and thought, Hmm, must be a comedy, I need a laugh. But if that is the case, then your ability to predict content from vocabulary clues leaves something to be desired. No, what I assume by your paying $35.95 (it is to cry) for the hardback copy of my fictitious tome is that you have interpreted the clues correctly and decided that you want to be sad. That is, you want to be manipulated.

When I was a teen, I was in a circus. (No, I am not manipulating you to make you feel disbelief; I really was in a circus.) I did this one act called rolling globe. At one point in the performance, I walk my globe up and over a teeter totter and up a ramp to a platform. I pause, contemplating the next step. The next step is, literally, a step--four or five, in fact. I'm balanced on top of a large globe. I look at the steps that I'm supposed to negotiate. I look out at the audience, fear in my eyes, check out those steps again, take a halting step/roll forward, pause . . . and cross myself. The audience--manipulated--bursts out laughing. (Nothing kills comedy deader than describing it.)

Few things in the world are entirely black or entirely white. Manipulating your child to eat, well, even that might not be as black as wakeupkitty would have us believe. The example given involved being allergic to something. But what if you aren't allergic to any kind of food? And what if, in addition, you hate vegetables. Should your parents just say, "Ah, well, the kid hates vegetables. I guess there's nothing we can do about that"? That is not the dialogue I would write.

By the way, I might have manipulated you, the reader of this comment. In the first paragraph, I wrote: "I am a writer (or like to think that I am, anyway)." If you assumed from that that I was trying to be self-deprecating, then I successfully manipulated you, because that was precisely what I was trying to make you think. Whether I am as humble as that comment might imply (or as arrogant as this comment might imply) is irrelevant, I wrote it specifically to make my reader, you, think that I am a modest, unassuming bloke. (No, I'm not British, what makes you think that?)

Before I sign off, let me provide this as balance: Manipulating someone to do your job because you're too lazy to do it, to think that you are oh-so in love so that you will get in the will, to get so furious that he/she will attack the person who is annoying you, well, that ain't any kinda good.