On Writing

So I was reading someone’s blog the other day, and while I was reading I thought to myself, “I should write on my blog, too.”  Not because I have anything important to talk about right now, but because their writing was so bad.  As I was reading, I thought, “Man, I could do so much better than this,” because what they wrote was so stilted and sounded like it came out of a bad novel.  The writing was what I think people think writing should be – lots of big words and elegant phrases, but the meaning, the heart, the personality was drained out of it.  This person’s writing was like that – they used lots of two-dollar words, and all the words together sounded very melodic, but there was no life to it.  You could tell that this person read a lot as a teenager and young adult, and so they thought they knew what writing should be.  So they tried to copy everything they had read and crammed it all into one blog post.  And it was utterly boring.

Now, I’m not saying I’m the best writer in the world – far, far from it.  But I do think, when you read my writing, you can hear my voice.  I think writing should sound like the author’s voice is inside your head.  And in really good writing, you can hear the author’s voice even though you’ve never met them before – that’s how good they truly are.

I have two favorite blogs that I read all the time.  Over the years, I’ve tried out many other blogs, and there are some that I go back to from time to time, but I always keep coming back to these two consistently.  I’ve become invested in them, you could say.  I feel like I know these women and I follow their lives and their journeys as if they are good friends who’ve simply moved far away, and this is how we keep in touch.  When I read their writing, I can hear their voices inside my head – it helps that I’ve also seen video of them, so I actually do know what their voices sound like, but what is exciting is that, their real voices sound like their writing voices, and vice versa.

It seems these days that everyone thinks they should have a blog, and so they do.  There are many, many great ones out there, but there seem to be a growing number of mediocre blogs as well.  Again, I don’t count myself in the former (or latter) company, but as a fan of good writing, I find it annoying as I search for my next favorite blog, that I have to comb through all the sub-par writing to get to the gems.

Torture in the Green Store

There is a cashier at our local Publix (as I am sure there is at least one at every grocery store in America) who is SO SLOW that it makes me want to beat my head against a wall.  I know we’ve all, at one time or another, ended up in the slow lane at the supermarket.  It is beyond frustrating.

This particular cashier is elderly (I’m not being ageist or anything – she is absolutely pushing seventy if not seventy-five) and moves in slow motion.  Super slow motion.  Frame by frame slow motion.  She picks up each item, looks at it to find the UPC code, then scans it slowly.  Sometimes, it doesn’t scan on the first pass, so she has to repeat the whole process.  If she gets a piece of produce, well, you could be here until next Sunday while she tries to figure out the code to enter.  Is this a Granny Smith or a Red Delicious?  Jazz or Braeburn?  Royal Gala or Honeycrisp?  Damn, who invented all these apple variations?!?

Now, I pay with cash.  It helps me stay on budget if I only have so much money in my pocket to spend.  So once she tells me the total (it’s $72.70) , I count out my money and hand it to her.  She then proceeds to RECOUNT my money out to me as she places it on the counter: “Twenty, Forty, Sixty, Eighty, Eighty-one, Eighty-two, Eighty-three Dollars.”  While she’s counting it, she is “snapping” each bill to make sure none of them stick together.  She enters the total into the register and her drawer pops open so she can give me my change (I should add that by this point, my groceries are all bagged and ready to go).  At this point, she takes the money again and counts it as she puts it in the cash drawer.  (Can you feel my frustration yet?  No?  Keep reading.)  Now it’s time to give me my change – $10.30 if my math is correct.  She takes out the ten dollar bill, snaps it, and takes out a quarter and a nickel.  She pulls the receipt off the machine and as she hands me the money, she counts it out again: “Ten Dollars and Twenty-five, Thirty cents.”  I take my change and immediately see that she has given me two tens, so I hand one back (0h, how I wanted to keep it, just to ease my frustration, but I’m a good girl and I couldn’t do it).  She is absolutely dumbfounded and the look on her face is one of complete shock: “Oh my God, and I snapped it!”  Like snapping it was the fail-safe.  She thanks me profusely but by this time I am just done and already rolling my cart to the exit.

Listen, I know that times are tough and everyone has to work.  I know there is no such thing as a pension anymore and that many older folks have to continue to work well beyond retirement.  Heck, I worked with many of them when I was a cashier.  And honestly, I don’t know why I’m in such a rush – it’s not like that extra three minutes spent in her line made me late the rest of the day.  I know all this, truly.  But I can’t help it – IT’S ANNOYING!

I want my cashier to be like I was when I was a cashier.  I was quick (I had a fast scanner pin that you got if you could scan more than 25 items a minute), I knew all my produce codes by heart, and I could count back money like a bank teller (not the way everyone does it now, where you just count the actual change back, but you count it back from where you ended – like, “Total was Seventy-two Seventy – change is thirty cents makes Seventy-three and Ten is Eighty-three”.  I also could bag groceries well (that may sound trivial, but if you’ve ever gone to the grocery store with five mesh bags and come out with only three full – three overpacked, twenty-pound bags – I mean, hell, why did I bring five bags if I only wanted you to use three?  You don’t need to make them so FRIGGIN’ heavy!  And put like with like – produce together, cold together, boxes together, etc.  It’s not that difficult.) - hell, I can still bag groceries faster than most of the baggers!  I loved being on the express lane because I took pride in clearing out a long line quickly.  Why can’t all cashiers be like me (twenty years ago, but still …).

The only thing I can do about this cashier is make sure I don’t go in her line next time.  If I do, I may just implode, right there where shopping is a pleasure.  That would definitely not be pleasurable for anyone.

I enjoy cold weather. Except when I don’t. Today is one of those days.