Chivalry is not Dead

It is rare though.

Dictionary.com defines chivalry as : "the sum of the ideal qualifications of a knight, including courtesy, generosity, valor, and dexterity in arms." ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chivalry+ )

I've heard my grandfather talk about how our generation is basically screwed. Even the media says we don't know how to physically communicate with each other (minus the technology) never mind romantically connect.

I disagree.

I think our generation connects in different ways than past generations. You can't blame us for the ingenious inventions that have slipped into our hands like Blackberry's, laptops and Facebook.

How I love Facebook!

Back to what I said at the beginning of this post: here's my proof that chivalry is not dead.

There's a guy that I work with (we'll call him Jim), during the evenings mostly, who plays off this mask of being smooth with the ladies. Some of Jim's stories and attitudes makes me question whether he's a borderline player-BUT-he had one elderly customer approach him in a small panic. She couldn't find her daughter.

She kept punching the fact that her daughter had to use a walker and was supposed to meet her in our department.

Many other employees would have just paged for her daughter, but Jim actually paged her and then preceded to walk around the store to look for her. While he was looking she sat down in the corner on a purple bench. He returned about ten minutes later saying he found her and would show her where her daughter was.

He offered his arm to her and she rested her shaky arm in his.

This came as a shock to me. I literally watched them walk down the center aisle of our store, until my eyes got too blurry to make sense of them anymore. It wasn't a romantic chivalry that I was seeing, but it was chivalrous, and it shocked me because it was coming from Jim.

I would never have expected Jim to care to offer his arm out to her.

So--chivalry is not dead just rare, deeply embedded in the hearts of today's generation of men. My guess is that it will come out when he really cares about the person he offers it to.

New Beginnings and Tieing Ends

2010

In years past I have made the cliche new years resolution to lose weight. I've read the diet books, like "You on a Diet" by the Opra-made-famous Dr. Oz, tried the silly slim "milk shakes" (or so they pretend to call them). I have always gotten tired of the blandness of the diet.

This year I'm going to change the direction of my new years resolution to something more productive: finishing my own novel. I'm going to admit that I have already cheated this resolution because I have already started this resolution almost a year ago. It's a project I have been working on off and on, mostly in the coffee cafes of Books a Million. I figure that if I can somehow construct a best seller, just one, I'd be able to establish a writers road for myself, carving some kind of road for myself to start my writing career.

I don't know if you have noticed, but the job market for any kind of writer is as slim and transparent as a clear thread: impossible to detect. This makes me afraid.

This is another reason I started this blog. I was hoping to figure out how to write an established blog, attract readers and comments and then make some money off the advertising. So far, this has not happened. Most of the time I write on this, I feel like I'm talking to a blank computer screen. Well.....I guess I am, aren't I?

Why not make two new years resolutions:
1. finish my book
2. make a successful blog

Stay tuned.