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I would like to direct all 3 of my readers (my husband, a cat, and some plankton) to a comment on my last entry.
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I would like to direct all 3 of my readers (my husband, a cat, and some plankton) to a comment on my last entry.
Long, long ago, I was a girl who visited Italy and, while in the back of someone's Fiat was informed that we were going to a truck stop for some coffee on the way home. I thought "truck stop? coffee? weird glass carafe with another orange carafe to indicate decaf? boiled chemical tasting coffee with special flavored "cremes"?" This seemed like a very bad idea.
We stopped at an Agip gas station whose symbol resembles a firebreathing chimera-like creature who likes tires. As we got inside, I noticed that half of the building was devoted to one very long and shiny bad-ass espresso machine. We order two coffees and I have so far experienced the best espresso yet. Ever.
A few days later, in the sleepy town of Mantova, we stop for coffee and this time I notice the staff before the machinery or the location. The women behind the counter are middle-aged, well-coiffed, and all business. They operate the espresso machinery with an efficiency I've never seen before and, when I receive my cappucino, I'm stunned that something so perfect took under a minute to produce. I have to ask my Italian friends: "Why are all the women so old and serious here?" I'm told that the barista is usually a woman, sometimes a man, who takes their job very seriously, and is paid handsomely with many state benefits. You cannot become a barista if your devotion to coffee is anything less than total, and, as such, are accorded a great deal of respect. Throughout my trip, which involved much coffee-drinking, I sampled espressos and cappucinos in Rome, Verona, Padova and noticed little, if any, variation between them. My coffee experience in Italy was transcendantly homogeneous.
A common complaint about Starbucks is that it attempts to provide the same experience to all its customers. Those of us loath to identify ourselves (though the label fits more often than not) as bourgeois, shun this as typical American strip-mall depersonalized b.s. We claim that we'd rather go to the corner shop and be served by the art student with sketchy hygienic habits who learned to make a halfway passable cappucino last week. If her boyfriend broke up with her that day, you can bet it might be a latte instead. I don't deny that there's a charm in that, but for me, a girl who takes her coffee seriously, it starts to wear thin.
One of the cardinal rules of blogging, or so I'm led to believe, is that one should never discuss one's professional life, lest a particularly fanged entry get in the hands of the wrong people. However, the things I would blog about, if I could blog about my professional life, are not fanged or mean-spirited. I work with children and hear some amazing things every day. Just yesterday, one of my students really hit one out of the park with an observation and I can't tell you about it. Sigh.
I'll substitute it with a story from my own childhood:
There was a time when I went to live with friends of my parents for the space of a few months or so. I was seven. When I think back on this time, I find it hard to believe it actually happened to me.
Olivia (not her real name), a southern deb and ex-socialite, owned a tract of land in suburban Pittsburgh. At the time I was sent to live with her, she had a rooster named "Hitler" (he had a particularly mean and combative nature though probably didn't deserve to be named Hitler), a hen named "Little Red Hen", a dog named "Pilgrim", and a cat named "El Gato". Little Red Hen lived in the garage because Olivia was worried about the zoning board discovering that she had chickens on her property. Every morning, I would fetch an egg from Little Red Hen and feel bad that she had to live in the garage. Once, I saw her actually expel the egg and it was one of those odd sort of moments, like when you accidentally see your parents naked, or someone in dire pain, and you're overwhelmed by the biology of it. I digress.
So, here's a song I made up about the rooster:
Oh, I would not be hitler the rooster!
I'll tell you the reason why: (tell us why!)
Because one fine day the lord's gonna come
and I'd be too CHICKEN to die.
Weebl is, in what I believe to be one of the best pictures ever taken of a cat, battle-scarred and well on his way to becoming a losingest kitten in the kitten war. It's a good thing that Weebl isn't aware of his less than stellar performance because we've been trying to keep his body image positive and cat-centric. I blame Cat Fancy and their ilk for promoting unrealistic and unattainable standards of kitten beauty. Do we really need a Britney Spears of the kitten world? Scrawny is beautiful!
The great thing about being married that no one tells you is the freedom to experiment with gender roles. I'm not talking about gender roles as they relate to one's sexuality, or anything lik'aht, but as they relate to how one can act socially.
I was out with MY HUSBAND and a few friends, all guys, when we started talking about which women at the bar were attractive. One friend had a truly brilliant taxonomy:
1. not attractive
2. attractive, but not attractive to me
3. attractive to me
So, now that I'm married and I'm hearing all this, I decide I'm gender-neutral. I take a walk around the bar, scoping out the women, only to be chatted up by a middle-aged dude about some band I now feel ashamed to have never heard, and come back with a report. This one is very beautiful, but maybe gay; this one has friends with her, this one has incredibly large shoulders, etc. etc. I actually pick one for another friend. From where we were sitting, he agrees that she looks very promising. Without his explicit permission but with strong encouragement from others, I sit down next to her and outline my case: "I'm married (not interested in you) and my friend (not my husband or boyfriend) thinks
you're beautiful and he'd like to buy you a drink. Oh, and do you like guys? (when I ask this question, I can't believe I'm asking it, but decide it's o.k. because I'm married, a social neutron) She says yes and it's clear that she's very flattered.
This is where I have an experience I never knew guys had
until last night. She accepts the drink but when she comes over to us we find out that she is, in fact, beautiful though quite a bit taller than my friend, who generally favors women of a smaller cast and figah (to be said to oneself with a southern accent). Perhaps there were platforms involved, but it becomes clear, alarmingly early, that the situation I'd brought forth was somewhat less than ideal.
I feel really bad, turn around so I don't have to watch the wreckage and think about buying the girl another drink or maybe a toaster just to thank her for being such a good sport.
I apologize. I'm really, really sorry. Mea maxima culpa.
Was, unbelievably: Kanye West's Torrent of Criticism, Live on NBC. I was just spending a minute or two checking out what there was to see after biking and before going out to dinner. My brain was essentially in idle, perhaps even park, as I watched the palest, most expressionless Mike Myers I have ever seen read from this script. I thought "this is odd" and, alternately "why does he look so frightened?". After Mike Myers finished reading a lot of term-papery nonsense, he handed the baton to Kanye West who simply said "Yeah, and George Bush doesn't care about black people!". Myers then looked at West and back at the camera with an expression I've seen sometimes at family dinners but never on CNBC.