Reputations

It's crazy but even as an ex-now-current citizen of Oakland, I buy into the hype that it's completely unsafe and marginally habitable. The everyday truth? People are pretty quite nice.

A man in his car told me to have a nice day today, and not facetiously, either. And because of that small act of random niceness, I uncharacteristically spoke to a stranger at IKEA and offered him my assistance. The poor guy was poorly managing two heavy shopping carts at the same time and I offered to help push one of them to his car and he accepted.

I hope he did something nice for someone else later on.

And so on, so forth.