A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the new Dunkin’ Donuts that recently opened up across the street from the building I work in. Before it existed, I was pretty frequently in the Starbucks that’s actually in my building, on the ground floor. I haven’t stopped going there entirely, though. I usually get my morning coffee at Dunkin’, but I still go for a Starbucks americano in the afternoon pretty regularly.
In any case, the point is that the staff there know me well. Several of the baristas know my name and my drink and will occasionally upsize it for free or give me drink vouchers if I have to wait for it longer than usual. But one of the guys who works there takes friendliness a little too far, and I’ve dubbed him Creepy Guy. He’s not a barista, and I usually see him refilling the milk containers or emptying the trash or whatever. Without fail, if he notices that I’m standing in line or by the bar waiting for my drink, he’ll stop whatever he’s doing and come over to talk to me.
I don’t remember when he switched from just acknowledging my presence in the store with a smile or a nod like most of the other employees do to pretending that we’re best friends forever, but it was pretty sudden, which is one reason it’s so creepy. One day he just started asking bizarre questions “Do you do breathing exercises when you’re upset?” I mean, what? Maybe I was looking stressed or irritated or something, but how is that a good way to open a conversation with a girl you don’t know even a little bit?
More frequently he asks things about my job - what floor my office is on, what my title is, how many people work with me. Once he joked that he was going to have to start hanging around in the the lobby to find out where my office was. He already knows my first name and the name of the company I work for from the other (non-creepy) staff members who see us in there a lot.
Either Creepy Guy is going to get fired (if he’s creepy with other customers who are more apt to complain than I am) or I’m going to have to abandon that Starbucks entirely. Which would be a shame given all the non-weird people there and the fact that even if Dunkin’ Donuts made an americano it would probably be wretched, but I really don’t need any more creepy people in my life.
Alarmingly hot out when I left for work this morning, and it’s only going to get worse throughout the day. I really need to move. I don’t understand why people voluntarily use their vacations to go to places where it’s always like this, or even worse. If I could score some time off and had the money to spare, I’d go somewhere cool and not too sunny. Maybe Ireland again.
I ordered a necklace from Superhero Designs a while back and it showed up on Saturday - I’ve been wearing it since, and the matching earrings as well. Mine is cotton candy and it’s even prettier than you might expect from the photo. Beautiful and very lightweight, even though the beads are big and gorgeous. I actually first saw the site a couple of years ago and wanted to buy a necklace then, but I was a broke college kid at the time and didn’t really have the money for things like that. So I’m really happy to finally have one. It’s definitely my new favorite necklace, and I think I’ll have to get another at some point - maybe champagne!
I had a good time this weekend with my mom, even though the weather was awful and made me want to die. Humid and pushing 90 on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday - it will be even worse this week. Hooray!
On Saturday Chris and I met my mom at her hotel room, then we all went for pizza at a nearby Italian place. The pizza was excellent. Chris threatened to replicate the restaurant’s interior design in our own apartment, complete with fake ivy and grapes. I told him to go for it.
After what was either a late lunch or an early dinner, we saw Mad Hot Ballroom at the AMC in Times Square. We were puzzled when we got to the theater and saw a line of incredible proportions stretching the length of a hallway and around a corner - it turned out that these people were waiting to see Mr and Mrs Smith. Unfathomable. In any case, our movie was great - as others have said, think Spellbound, only the kids are just learning to do their thing rather than already being awesome at it. I generally despise children and I still liked the film, as did Chris.
After that we fought our way through the Saturday night crowd in Times Square (my mother was as horrified as we were) and stopped for a Mister Softee on our way back to Roosevelt Island, where the moms got to see our apartment for the first time. The cat didn’t even bite her, so I guess it was pretty successful.
Yesterday it was just me and my mom, and we decided to go shopping in SoHo. I always make a point of visiting the Pearl River Market when I’m nearby, so we stopped in there for Pocky and fabric and shoes and paper balloons shaped like pandas. I also picked up some more stuff for the apartment, which is always fun.
Today I’m just dreading the heat and wishing I had one more day to relax, even though I kind of had the day off on Friday so I really shouldn’t complain.
I’m tired, as usual. It sort of feels like a Friday because I’m working from home tomorrow, which should be nice. My parents were supposed to come and visit this weekend, but my dad now has Lyme disease and is wisely staying home, so it will be me and my mum instead. I’m thinking of things for us to do that involve avoiding the sun and the heat.
Listening to a lot of The Smiths this week, although yesterday was primarily Bowie.
Too much caffeine again lately. I’ve been drinking a coffee (or other caffeinated beverage) as soon as I wake up, an americano or red eye when I get downtown, another before lunch, sometimes an iced coffee with lunch, and then another americano around three. My tolerance is insane now, so all the caffeine does at this point is make me jittery and uncomfortable without actually waking me up. I guess that means it’s time to suffer through a week or so of withdrawal headaches and then start over. Ideally I would just get more sleep, but in practice it doesn’t really work that way.
Last week, I reread Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. I’ve read Neuromancer dozens of times of course, but the sequels not so much. They’ve grown on me a little bit, but I still think that Neuromancer on its own is a lot stronger than the three of them as a trilogy. I do like all three books, though.
This week I’m rereading the Chronicles of Narnia. Yeah, I know, right? They’re very quick reads because they’re short and written for kids, so I go through one of them in less than a day of commuting, but they’re so good. It’s been such a long time since I last read them (I must have been about nine or ten, I guess) that I only vaguely remember most of them, and some of them not at all. They really are a joy to go through again.
It’s a measure of how numbed we were by the heat that Chris and I actually sat through a reality show last night called “The Scholar.” It was so awful that I feel I have to say something about it, yet it was also so awful that I don’t even know where to begin. The premise is that a bunch of high school kids are competing with each other for a hefty scholarship. Except that the competition itself has so little to do with academic achievement in any sense that the whole thing is just baffling. The kids involved are not writing papers or taking tests, no - they have to run around the USC campus solving grammar school logic puzzles, and the whole thing is topped off with a gameshow-style trivia quiz.
And yet the numbnuts host keeps saying through the whole thing that this is somehow preparing them for “a real college curriculum.” How do you figure? I seem to have made it out of NYU without ever being graded on my performance in a scavenger hunt or literature bee. Maybe they do things differently at USC, but I doubt it.
Don’t get me wrong: I loved the long, chilly spring. But I think it’s positively cruel to go from March weather to July weather in the space of a weekend. Last week we were seeing highs in the 60s, and now they’re in the high 80s and 90s. Disgusting. Chris and I are still shocked (and awed), so we’ve been hiding out in the apartment with the air conditioners going. If I could work from home for the next three months, I would.
I spent a couple of hours on Saturday sorting through all my summer clothes which were still packed from the move. (The fact that they’re summer clothes doesn’t mean they’re not black, by the way.) Now I just have to iron everything and/or make a few hundred trips to the dry cleaners and I can stop being miserable in long sleeves. Or I could just jump off the Queensboro bridge.
I’ve gotten a few referrers lately from people googling for things like “harvard waitlist” or “waitlisted harvard”. Given that it’s that time of year again, I’m assuming these actually are people who just found out they got waitlisted at Harvard. Ouch. If it makes you feel any better, I essentially got that letter twice - when I applied early, they deferred me to regular admission, and when regular admission rolled around, they just waitlisted me. If you came here looking for advice on what to do about it, I can’t really help all that much. I just went to NYU instead. Their big fat packet full of scholarship offers and material about the honors program showed up about a week after my grim little envelope from Harvard, and I’m glad it did, because as it turns out I liked NYU a lot and New York City even more. So, um, go to NYU! Go Fighting Violets!
It’s almost alarming how quickly time is going by lately. It’s June already? Seriously, what the fuck? It seems like when I’m working (at least full time and onsite) the days have a tendency to blur together that they just don’t have in other contexts, like school. Semesters go by at a pretty rapid pace, but they’re identifiable chunks of time with a beginning, a middle, an end, and a break before the next one. Work just goes on and on and on. I guess that’s why there are vacations.
Working in the summer also tends to remind me of my first year in New York, I guess because I hadn’t had a real job during the summer before that. Just crappy teenager stuff, like washing dishes or working at Dunkin’ Donuts. I remember being really stressed out at the place I worked at in the summer of 2000, because the office environment was pretty strict and the turnover was really high - few people were capable of getting along with the VP who ran things for the most part, so there was a lot of quitting and firing. But it was also a fun time because I was nineteen and had more money coming than I needed for rent and bills. I didn’t have any trouble spending the extra, though. I think I still have the pair of three hundred dollar boots I bought my second or third week at that job.
Also weird to think about is the fact that I worked with Chris at that job, but we didn’t really know each other very well. I definitely didn’t think I’d be living with him on Roosevelt Island five years later or that after seeing him for two and a half years, coming home to him would still be the best part of my day.
