Thrift store DEFINITION: A non-profit or for-profit retail establishment selling previously owned, second-hand items ranging from clothes, housewares, appliances, books, electronics, and miscellanea. Donations to thrift stores are usually tax-deductible. Here Wikipedia's international description of a thrift store, also known as a charity shop. The thrift store was always an exciting place to go growing up. We didn’t have a lot of money, so every couple of months, we’d hit the local thrift store for clothing and other supplies. This is a picture of the thrift store I remember the most. It’s the RAD Thrift Store, located at 215 West Main Street, Santa Maria, California. There is a smell to thrift stores (at least all the thrift stores that I have ever visited). It smells like body odor, mildew, disinfectant, perhaps ages of perfumes, cigarette smoke, dank attics, danker basements, and lastly, I suppose it smells like poverty. I can remember running through the aisles
There was a news story once about the current generation of workers, basically asking the question if the Y (and post-Y) generation are "lazy"? It was pretty interesting, albeit they had a rather ambiguous wrap-up (I think they tried too hard to narrow the question down into something they could answer simply). There definitely seems to be a problem with our collective view of "work ethics" in general.
ReplyDeleteI'll concede that no one ever "made it big" in the world by working 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, but between the 70-year-old man who worked 12 hour days, 7 days a week at the mill for 50 years with only a watch to show for it and the high-school graduate who bought a lottery ticket on his 18th birthday, won the jackpot, and therefore never has to work the rest of his life, there's got to be a middle ground that's "good enough" where we're not lazing about yet not working ourselves to death, either. That's where our perceptions come in, namely those of others.
There's a saying about artists (it's typically applied to writers, but I think it can be broadened) that even though they may only spend a few hours a day, maybe a few days a week actually sitting at the desk "working", the fact is that they're never NOT working. When I would get home from T-Mobile, I never took work home with me, there wasn't any need to and nothing I could have if I wanted to. On the other hand, my videos, writings, illustrations, photographs, and even music, those never get left behind; they're constantly in my head, and I don't even have a paycheck riding on any of those. I'm always mapping out scenes, looking for subjects, listening for unusual sounds, anything that has to do with my art, it's always there, even if for all intents and purposes I don't really want it there. I used to joke with my brother that if I ever became self-employed or had to work from home, my workspace would have to be a shed in the farthest corner of the backyard, and there'd have to be a hedge-maze between it and the house so that by making the "commute" slightly tedious, there'd be some "psychological distance" to keep me sane.
Never wrote a response to this but I think it harkens back to our recent conversation. I appreciated this well thought out response.
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