Luckily, sometimes in correcting my idiotic mistakes, I gain new insight.
The particular idioticness of which I speak is in regards to my last packet of homework. I had started it in a rough draft, and then proceeded to work in a different document, pulling the information from the rough draft to the less-rough draft. This, however, is not why I’m an idiot.
Short story long, I saved my final draft over my rough draft, sending several pages into computer oblivion. Whoops.
So, just now, I finished rewriting all three of my book annotations (about five pages long altogether), and as one might suspect, it is not as easy to write about a book several weeks after having read it. Don’t get me wrong; I like to give books a couple of days to marinate, but not a couple of weeks.
This is where my idiot-correction comes into a positive light.
As I was rewriting my annotation on Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, which explores the difference between “space” and “place” (think of it like as what makes a house a home), I thought about a conversation I had with my older brother, Jason, about a week ago as we were driving to our family’s holiday party.
This particular bit of the conversation began with Jason telling me of his girlfriend’s displeasure working at a Macy’s Clinique counter, where the employees are pressured to sell, sell, sell!
I said I would suck at working on commission.
He felt the same way about himself: “I can’t sell something if I don’t believe in it myself.”
He told me about how he did enjoy working a plant sale in Columbus for a few days: “I really liked helping people figure out which tree was best for them. Like, with their soil and light, and how much care they want to give it, and directing them to good information on care. If I didn’t think we had the right tree for them, I wouldn’t sell them one, but I’d tell them what to look into.”
I agreed that, although I feel like I’m not a very good salesperson, I wouldn’t want to sell someone a product of mine that they would not truly enjoy. “If you’re not going to love it and keep it and it’s not going to make you happy, I don’t want you to have it, so keep your money.”
This sentiment may or may not change as I find myself in a state of extreme poverty.
