Whew!

Oh thank you, dear Friends, who responded to what I wrote yesterday.  I was so nervous as I pushed the button to send, with that negative, nasty little critic in my head chirping that this was stupid, who cares what you have to say, blah, blah blah. But I did it anyway, and it felt good (eventually). So, whew!

Have you had the experience of going into a retail shop, and the clerk there acts as if you are an interruption to her/his day? That happened to me today, and I just don't get it. Why in the world in this economy especially are retail people not falling all over themselves with kindness and helpfulness?

I've worked in retail, and it's a hard, foot-aching job.  Some customers can be absolute nut cases, agreed, but in my limited retail experience I found that most people are nice and respond ever so much more positively (i.e., likely to purchase) if you smile and are genuinely pleasant to them. Whenever I'm in a store now, and clerks are rude-ish, I often just leave instead of buying there. Sadly, this is likely to happen in small, local shops just as frequently as in bigger stores. It seems like common sense to be nice to customers, but perhaps that sense isn't as common as it could be.

***
"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet:  how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of.  There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person."          
 --Mister Rogers

What's It Like Productions

Day One of blogging. Figuring out a name could have taken me days with second-guessing and trying to get the perfect name. In fact, I've put off doing a blog for quite a while because I couldn't come up with a creative enough name. Finally, I decided to pick a name and go with it because really, the point is writing, right?

However, I've always liked the concept of "what's it like" because it seems as if that's always been a driving force for me -- I've always wondered what's it like to be this or that; for example, what's it like to be a nurse or a teacher, two of my earliest career aspirations that I eventually discarded because (a) blood makes me nauseous and (b) becoming a teacher was what my parents thought I should do so that was out early on, thanks to my rebellious nature.

For as long as I can remember, I've felt the curiosity of wanting to know what's it like -- what's it like for other people to be who and what they are -- what's it like, what's it like, what's it like. I drove my parents crazy by always asking questions -- they were not the communicative type, to put it kindly.

So I turned to writing at a young age to express my feelings. Word got around school that I could turn out a pretty fair unrequited love poem of the "oh why doesn't he love me, I am so blue" genre that I eventually was asked to ghost-write poems for my friends that they would later pass in class to teenage boys who could give a **** about love -- they only wanted to get laid.

Even so, my poems were popular, plus I received some admiration for my work.  Thus began my writing career. And now, after years and years of writing for a living, writing about everything from heat pumps to health insurance to hot tea, I've decided to come back to finding out again what's it like -- what's it like for me, a 59-year-old woman to be living and feeling and doing.  Thanks for coming along on the journey.