other duties, not assigned.

[bluecastle]

I had a marvelous chat with a very stylish black woman in the elevator of the parking garage this morning. She was admiring my thrift store black and white check London Fog coat (everyone seems to love the coat), and saying how black and white is always a good look. Then we talked about her black and white striped top, and she said she originally had it on with brown pants but her daughter said that wasn't good to mix black and brown, and the woman protested "but Oprah does it." And if it's good enough for Oprah ... (but she had changed into black pants!) :)

Then we were out of the elevator and off on our separate ways, and she called out "have a nice day," as we parted.

Talking to people in elevators is hard you guys.

I think I am slowly getting better at doing it, but it freaks me out everytime.

And it's teaching me how much my default preset reaction to people is "how are you going to hurt me?" instead of "Hi how are you?"

My head, it is messed up.

And let's not even get into how hard it is to deal with the physical interactions on elevators when I'm trying to defer to others, either to be nice, or because they are somehow of a higher power status than me and I've been trained to let those people go first ... but they're doing the "no please go ahead of me, I'm a nice person thing" so we have this awkward dance of in and out as the elevators doors open.

My life has taught me that people are scary. Trying to change that is a challenge!