Vacillating Velocity

This one’s been brewing for a while now, so to speak.

Stop shoving your money / credit card at me like it’s some sort of diseased rodent. I’m using my hands to punch in your order at the moment, so not only can I not take your money, I can’t complete the transaction yet anyhow. Wait five seconds. Once you’ve given me your card, here’s another tip - my hands do not process electronic transactions. Don’t grab for your card until AFTER I’ve run it through the swipey-thing. In fact, don’t grab at it at all. It’s rude.

It’s not a huge deal, but when I say “Hi, how can I help you?”, “Good, thanks.” is an incorrect response. As long as you treat me like a person and not a vending machine, though, I don’t really care if you goof up the pleasantries. Honestly, I’m not really paying attention to you, either. But we’re still both humans. Don’t bark your order at me like I’m a robot. And, this is just the grammar nazi in me talking, don’t say “I need.” You want. Everything we sell is a luxury. Speaking of luxuries and poor phrasing, “I’ll take” and “I’ll have” come off as pompous.

Now on to the meaty stuff: bar drinks. First off, and I really can’t emphasize this enough, in a busy coffee shop, the barista is, by far, the busiest and hardest working person in the store. Yes, you don’t have to stand in line to ask them for things. But guess what? Don’t. You know how you don’t like waiting for your drinks to come out? Well, when you harass the barista to do whatever it is you want that you should be asking a counterperson for, you are slowing down the drinks of everyone.

When you order your drink, there are perhaps forty different modifier buttons that we have to choose from. They range from milk types (not a huge deal, unless you think you really need us to mix lowfat and nonfat, because that extra gram of fat is going to make a profound difference in your life) to foam amounts to number of shots to . . . temperature. You can order your drinks “extra hot.” I imagine that the typical person who orders a drink this way thinks that we magically up the temperature on that drink so that it will stay hot for them longer. What the request actually means is that you want us to scald your milk. Which takes us extra time, tends to make a mess and shitty foam, and makes the milk unuseable in other drinks. My favorite is the “extra hot” au lait - which is 2/3 coffee. News flash - our coffee only comes in one temperature. Even scalding your milk by 20 degrees will only increase the temperature of your drink by, let’s get our calculators out, 6 2/3 degrees. Buy an insulated cup, idiot. Paper doesn’t retain heat very well.

And last, but not least, the cappuccino. Clearly many of the people who order these have only heard the name, and don’t have any idea what they are. A cappuccino is freshly steamed milk-foam, that hasn’t had a chance to settle out, poured over espresso. Milk-foam then separates into milk and foam, and the foam dissipates. It’s an extremely ephemeral drink. If you are sending some poor schmuck to pick up coffee for the office, which won’t be consumed by you until five or ten minutes, minimum, after you order it, don’t waste the barista’s time ordering a drink that will have devolved into a shitty latté by the time you get it. You want a latté. Trust me. I’m a professional.

You’d think, with decade 3 of my life almost at an end, that I’d be done discovering new allergies. I’m long over my childhood sensitivity to milk and milk products - thank god, because I have a love for cheese that is illegal in 26 states. (And no, mom from 20 years ago, tofu is not a reasonable alternative) It’s possible I’m allergic to shellfish, but that would be like having an allergy to moon rocks - not likely to cause problems in the next fifty years or so. So I thought I was done.

Imagine my confusion, then, when recent consumption of iced tea has frequently led to mild nausea. I’m talking tea prepared by various locations in our franchise and some prepared by myself in my home. I’d pretty well linked the cause and effect after it happened a few times, but resigned myself to live with occasional mild queasiness when I wanted my caffeine delivered in a non-coffee way. No big deal.

This morning, tea decided to up the ante in the Battle of My Digestive System. I brewed up a pot of Ceylon Fancy, inadvertently making it a bit on the strong side. I sat down and began drinking it during my morning troll through the internet. After two cups or so, my body immediately and without warning sent out that all-too-familiar distress call: “Find something to contain your hurl, RIGHT NOW.”

I think the toilet bowl absorbed more of the caffeine than I did. What am I going to do with my increasingly more awesome collection of teas from around the world?

Brook Busey, a.k.a. Diablo Cody, is five days younger than me. I need to get going.

I know you’re creeping up on me, 30, but don’t expect me to go quietly into this next decade. Witness the $17 pimping of my ride:

Dreamt of Colorado last night. Asleep, I’d moved back there, began checking in with all my old buddies (never mind that one of them lives in Portland, now) and was reveling again in all the natural beauty that, after a while there, I’d been taking for granted. I miss the hell out of that place, even though I’m glad I’m here. I’ve got the day off today, and man it’d be nice if I could hop in the car, drive for twenty minutes, then strap on my board and take some turns. Oh well. It’ll also be nice to have a college degree.

In memory of sleepy ski-town livin’, I put up some old pictures of my Colorado commute.

The Office of Undergraduate Advising - Academic Progress
date Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 3:55 PM
subject Your Application for Readmission

Dear Mr. Baldwin:

Welcome back to UC Berkeley!

Your application for readmission to the College of Letters and
Science for the Fall 2008 semester has been approved. Please review
the information below carefully and contact the College if you have
any questions.

Took some pictures this weekend while exhausting myself at Heavenly. It reminded me that I haven’t taken hardly any pictures since I got back to California - the last picture I have of myself I still have long hippie hair. This makes me sad, since I really enjoy having pictures of stuff - with my awful memory, it’s good to have a back-up of my life lying around. I shall endeavor to take photos more frequently.

This morning marked my first real foray into academia in damn near ten years. I was pretty nervous, afraid that I’d show up and the lecture would start and I would be lost immediately. Still, I was excited to start some sort of exercise regimen for my brain, so I threw on some ridiculous socks emblazoned with the South Korean flag that my brother gave me for luck, and headed out.

It went splendidly. The material all makes sense and is interesting so far, my professor is super nice, easy to understand, and makes really dorky jokes. I have high hopes for this whole “learning” thing.

The one thing that really struck me, though, about the whole experience, was this: they sell condoms in the Men’s room. I mean, really? I understand it when it’s at, you know, a bar, but a community college? I’m trying to picture the situation where that’s necessary. “Man, that remedial English quiz was hard. So hard it made me . . . horny! Wanna fuck RIGHT NOW?” Weird.

And now? Homework. D’oh.

Today was weird. I went out to my car and it wouldn’t start, so I got a ride in to work from my roommates. I was a couple minutes late, and I tried to call to let them know, but the line was busy. So I raced in the front door to find . . . that they had no idea I was late. Because the power was out.

Other than some cleaning work, we had a remarkably dead day. It was like a vacation at work. People would come in for something hot to drink, but other than a couple of batches of coffee that our store manager brewed himself by hand with the last of our hot water, all we had were pastries. I felt like the rebellious McDonald’s owner from the Mitch Hedberg joke. “Happy meals? Nope. We got spaghetti!” Other than that we just stood around and b.s’d.

Walking a mile and a half home from Caltrain in the Tsunami that Sunnyvale had become was unpleasant, and I got soaked head to toe. Fortunately, I’m still in a good enough mood that it didn’t get me down. That’s right, who got promoted yesterday? Oh - it was me.

I have had bestowed upon myself the title of Shift Lead, and all the perks it affords and the respect it commands. The commonfolk I supervise will tremble before my iron fist of . . . so I get another buck an hour, and I have to spend less time on the floor. Sounds good to me. Not bad for three and a half months in.

Other than that, I’m bidin’ time until school starts, and I have to think about math more complicated than the cost of “fries with that” for the first time in a lotta years. Yikes. Kicksteart my heart? Jumpstart my brain, please.

Christmas occupies this weird place in my life, in my head. It doesn’t mean a whole lot to me, in one way - my family is neither traditional nor close-knit enough for it to be a big deal, and I’ve been poor enough for the last few years that the consumerism aspect of it has been pretty minimal for me. But the season still triggers something in me, the romantic aspect of it, thoughts of togetherness and warmth and love amongst people.

Tonight, Christmas Eve, I went with my father to Christmas Eve service at Stanford’s Memorial Church, something I’ve never done before, just for the experience. It was nice, and all, but it mostly felt touristy - almost everyone there for the same reason as I - for the spectacle, no real idea what was going on. It was nice but hollow, and now that I continue my loneliness at home (my roomates off visiting family and the house to myself) I think back to recent Christmases past. Last year this time I was throwing a party at my new house in Colorado, having invited over all my friends who were similarly without family to have a Christmas celebration to make up for the ones we were missing. We drank Brazilian cocktails and wore Santa hats and did some blow. The year before, it was boxed wine and Veronica Mars and the dread of waking up in the morning to operate a chairlift.

I’m still, as happy as I mostly am, a bit lonely here, a bit out of place.