Starbucks.

There is a Panera and a Starbucks conveniently close to my work, and I've been stopping in to Panera to get their morning souffles, and man, are they fab. I reward myself with food, so one morning after I'd had a seriously terrible night, I went to Panera AND Starbucks in the same morning. This is NOT common practice for me - in fact, I've been coffee-sober for 2 years. I get the non-coffee frappucinos (you know, the really, really sugary ones) and even then I hardly go to Starbucks anymore. That time, I'd had such a terrible night I decided I needed a souffle AND a frappucino. I mean, I was going to be working for 9 hours each day all week, it was raining, my hair was wet, my shoulder hurt, I had some time to kill, it was such a hurricane of reasons to get Panera and Starbucks it would have been ludicrous if I hadn't. That was a few weeks ago.

So this morning I got my souffle and thought to myself, "wow, I made it here with an extra 5 minutes to spare. I should reward this momentous accomplishment with Starbucks." I grappled, though. That is money I do not need to spend. Any dollar I toss away now is one less dollar I'll have when we really need it (like, soon) and my sense of responsibility was duking it out with my sense of I-love-frappucinos. I decided to drive over and see what the line was like. It was outrageous. I left. But I really, really wanted that damn frappucino. Once you get the itch, man, it owns you. So I told myself, "ok, I won't get one, UNLESS I see another Starbucks."

It is maybe 2 minutes from this Starbucks to my work, but there are 2 shopping centers between it and that, which I had never thought to check for Starbucks before so I thought I was making a safe bet. I was not. And I found myself in utter disbelief that there were no more Starbucks between Starbucks and work, which caught me short, since just a few years (months?) ago we were all geeking out when we'd see more than one Starbucks in any given area. And now I've come to expect it. I'm even hedging bets on it.

To be sure, there were other coffee places between Starbucks and work - 7-11 and Dunkin' Donuts. 7-11 is ick, and Dunkin' Donuts...I just wouldn't know what to do. They're two different languages and cultures entirely. I can sense myself cautiously opening the door to a Dunkin' Donuts and being completely taken aback by what I see, trying to fall in line and act like the other customers like some alien who was dropped off at the wrong planet. What the hell, there are DONUTS here?? The colors are all wrong! What is this pink and orange garbage?And then I'd try to order and it would all come out wrong and the sales associate would look at me funny, and I wouldn't understand a thing she was saying.

Jacky: I'd like a grande vanilla bean frappucino, please.
cashier: Flarb?
Jacky:...what?
cashier: dooga blagin flarb?
Jacky: frappucino. vanilla. bean.
cashier: ugh, flaggin dooskie meekin flarb?
Jacky: I...I don't -
cashier: glaskin decker flarb moogen.
disgruntled customer behind me: dooga blagin flarb, you idiot!
Jacky: just give me a donut.

Honestly, I don't even know what the inside of a Dunkin' Donuts looks like anymore. I vaguely remember some kind of metal people-herder to keep the line in one place, like at amusement parks.

I heard on a reputable news program on the radio that some university did a huge cultural study and found that if you are democrat you are more likely to go to Starbucks and if you are republican you are more likely to go to Dunkin' Donuts. They were some seriously big stats, too, like 90% of Starbucks' clientele is democrat and 85% of Dunkin' Donuts' clientele is republican. If you are Green Party, you stay home and drink tea. I just made that up, because it was an easy joke.

*sideline*

Speaking of easy jokes, working at a scrapyard is seriously one huge game of That's What She Said, except no one is playing but me, and I'm only playing in my head because I'd probably get fired if I didn't. We have these radios and everyone gets one, so it's very cool how we're all like secret agents with radios that clip onto our belts. I get to say things like "prices on line 1" and "the shipper is calling on line 2," and then action happens! People do things! The radios are fabulous, I love the radios. Every workplace should have radios - these phones and IMs are getting cocky. Take it back old school, people! But the best part about the radios is I get to hear what everyone else says to each other, and all I want to do, all day, is get on the damn thing and say "that's what she said, over." We don't say stuff like "over" and "roger" but that would make it funnier. Here are a list of things I heard really did hear over the radio today:

Guy 1: What's the baler doing now?
Guy 2: your cans.
Jacky: That's what she said.

Guy 1: This guy has 200 pounds of copper wire.
Guy 2: how many feet?
Guy1: I don't know, it's too long.
Jacky: That's what she said.

Guy 1: What's wrong with the load?
Guy 2: It's too big, I can't fit it in.
Guy 1: well, pull it out and put it back in. Pack it in hard.
Jacky: That's what she said, that's what she said, THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID.

sigh.

*end of sideline*

So, I was in disbelief and angry that there was no Starbucks near the Starbucks. I even got to the point of cursing the whole area with a "Jesus, Glen Burnie! Join humanity, why don'tcha?"

And it got me thinking about this book I'm reading called The White Tiger. It's a first person fiction story about man from India who pulls himself out of his caste by playing the Indian political and social system by bribery and murder and spying. It's really good so far. But there's a part where he is a boy and takes his father to the village hospital because his father is about to die of tuberculosis. The hospital assistants lay his father out on newspapers in the hallway with all the other sick people with limbs hanging off and jaundice. They say they hope a doctor comes out to the hospital that night. The doctors of the area have a pact with the Dude In Charge of Doctors that if they give him one third of their yearly salary they won't have to go to the shitty village hospital, and so they just don't, and the father dies.

And here I want another Starbucks between Starbucks and my job.

Shame.

Work.

Worked at the scrapyard today, and overheard my boss describe me to a trucker as "the brainiac over there," because I "can do computer things." Someone has been deceiving this poor woman, and I think it's me. The more I do work things in the not-college world, the more of a dunce I turn out to be. All I can say is, thank science for Google. Really. My beloved boss, henceforth called DP, is a self-taught computer genius, with no formal education to speak of, 4 grown children, 3 ex husbands, and a backwoods upbringing. This is a woman who can speak at length on how to butcher, bleed, and cook venison, drives a firebird, owns two motorcycles, and collects cars that her mechanic husband drag races all over the country. She weighs about 110 pounds, outlines her eyes in thick, kohl-like eyeliner, and scoliosis has curved her back to make her about 5'4, but she commands, baby. She. Knows. Scrap. And she knows computers.

She has networked EVERYTHING together, created entire databases of information that automatically update if any user makes a change, she's taken Quickbooks and made it her bitch, she's fixed computer hardware with a broken screwdriver she found in a scrap bin, and what's more, ladies and gentlemen, she has attained the unattainable: DP has broken the Microsoft Office Suite, as one breaks a wild stallion, taming it and bending it to her every will with the minutest of keystrokes from her black-tipped gothic french manicured nails.

Do you know what this means? OF course you do. You have gotten into screaming matches with Word, when it won't format your shit. You have searched and searched and SEARCHED for the superscript font, but you can't find it. You have tabbed, caps locked, returned, and track-commented yourself into a foaming passion that can only be cured by knocking over your office chair, watching 2 hours of the food network, and eating peanut butter right out of the jar.

Can you even imagine a person to whom Word and Excel cower in fear? Can you imagine a person who, at one point in time, must have leaned in to a computer monitor, her breath making delicate fog clouds on the screen, and quietly whispered, "not this time, motherfucker," and then systematically ripped open the inner macros and micros and formats and options until nothing sacred and nothing secret remained? And every time after that, when a new blank document was to be created, Office let out a sigh of submission and bent over?

I have met this person, and she is formidable, with all her venison and Harleys. And somehow, this person thinks that I am her equal, that she can relinquish her extraneous tasks to me, and I will be able to do them with her same kind of mastery and skill. DP will rattle off a series of instructions to me to do this, do that, network this, create that, print this, sum-total this, cascade menu these things, link this spreadsheet with this database, import these entries into Quickbooks in this format, and all I can do is sit there and nod my head, give her the good ole "oh, yeah, I've been doing this for YEARS, lady," and turn to my computer hoping to god whatever comes up on her monitor will be interesting enough to divert her eyes from mine for at least an hour or two while I frantically:

1. try to remember what is the end result I'm trying to accomplish from this heinous list of computer tasks she has given me,

2. google the ever-loving crap out of it to figure out how it's done,

3. trial-and-error the process for about 45 minutes until I feel safe taking the first leap into my pile of assignments.

And on top of this, I know it's crucial to every now and then ask a good question, to let her know I am totally on the level. So, every half hour I'll lean over and say, "DP, do you want this cascade menu to have some kind of default option, or do you want it to be a blank unless an option is chosen?" or, "DP, I'm re-formatting this bill of lading and I was wondering if you need these couple of fields to be fillable areas with set constraints, or if you want me to leave the document unprotected in case any of the legal language changes for each shipment." Do I know what I'm saying? Not really. But I seem to be doing ok in her eyes at least, because she's calling me the brainiac to a bunch of truckers. And she's liked my documents so far.

I have made one valuable contribution to the office computer network, and that was to essentially network the other 5 offices together with the Glen Burnie office through the free online vaulting site Dropbox. She had one document she needed all the offices to fill out each Monday without them emailing her their pieces and she sticking them manually into the spreadsheet for them. Through some miraculous, silvery and spider-thin connective arc from my past to my present, when I was a technical writer for Digi-Data, this kind of file-sharing gobbledygook was exactly what I was working on in its nascent stages back in 2008. So when she told me of this problem she was having, I got to work, googling (of course) the various programs available today to make this possible. In 20 minutes I had Dropbox, and in 4 hours I had 5 offices in MD and 1 in PA editing a single document, updating simultaneously, just like DP had going with all the programs in our main office.

And THAT little piece of brainiac karma I plan on riding until my legs are half driven into the ground.

Movies.

Yesterday, I woke up at 7:30 and watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because I just read the book and needed to know. First of all, didn't realize it was Johnny Depp until the hat came off. Secondly, was kind of surprised it was directed by Terry Gilliam, whose latest offering was a steaming pile of self-congratulatory slag known as The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which also had Johnny Depp in it, for just a little bit.

Then, as I scanned through the Netflix, I saw Babes in Toyland, which I had faint memories of watching when I was a kid. At least, I thought I did. When I called my mom halfway through this cinematic atrocity to demand and explanation, she said she didn't remember it at all, so maybe I made my memory up because the Babes in Toyland music is so famous. At first, I wasn't going to watch it...until I noticed it was starring Keanu Reeves. And Drew Barrymore, right at the age when she began snorting cocaine and drinking tequila. You know, 13. So I watched it, and now I know why Drew Barrymore started snorting cocaine and drinking tequila at that age. There are lots of scenes where people are close-talking to her face (for some reason, probably because the director didn't know how to frame a shot) and I kept thinking, "Can't you smell it on her breath? By her own admission she was smoking a pack a day when she was 13. Was there a behind the scenes Babes in Toyland Barrymore intervention? It's the only thing that would excuse this movie for being so, so, so very shitty, is if everyone was more concerned about Drew Barrymore's 13 year old intervention than they were making sets.

But man, Keanu Reeves. I know I have seen this movie, I know it. Way back in my toddler brain, this movie registered. And I wonder if my teenager brain, in the primitive part, remembered that I'd seen Keanu in Babes in Toyland when I saw him in The Matrix. I think I might have. Because all through The Matrix I remember feeling that he was a little off, like he was hiding something in his eyes. And it wasn't the whole Morpheus speech about "all your life, you've felt that things were not as they should be" and excellent work on the directors' parts to make the audience feel it. No, it's something much more primitive that I think we all feel when we watch Keanu act. It seems that he, more so than any other actor, is unable to separate his past from what he's doing at the moment, so all the bad movies he's made are haunting HIM, instead of US. We can forgive. We want to forgive. But Keanu....he can't forget.

Then we (WE, not I) watched (*choke*) 6 episodes of Denise Richards: It's Complicated.

Then I watched the second Matrix, which did not suck as badly as I thought it did when I first saw it! In fact, it was great. It made sense this time, It flowed from the first one...because I really hated this thing when I first saw it. I don't even think I've seen the third, that's how much I hated it. Maybe because it's been about 8 years since I saw it and computer programs are no longer such a mystery to me, and all that blahsy-blah about back doors and exiled programs and keymakers and shit were way too elevated back then. Of course, Keanu seems way too...present in each scene, like he's saying his lines, but his eyes are saying, "Ok, now I'm reaching into Trinity's body and pulling out the bullet, which is so much cooler than that time I drove a little purple decoupaged go-kart around Toyland to help save Georgie Porgie and the Cookie Factory. SO much cooler. I hope everybody remembers THIS, as I EXTRACT THIS BULLET WITH MY BARE HANDS IN MY BITCHIN BLACK LEATHER TRENCHCOAT, and not THAT, when I was locked in a jail cell by the evil Barnaby Barnacle, scourge of Toyland, and I sang that song at the top of my lungs about Cinncinnati Ohio being the best city in the world so I wouldn't turn into an evil minion by breathing in the evil smoke he sprayed everywhere."

Fact-check me, I triple-dog dare you.

What a big, open Sunday I have before me. I have little stepping stones of stuff to do, like clean the kitty box and wash my bras, but I could do anything I wanted today, provided it's free. So that's pretty much movies and books, which is what I did yesterday. But I have another Matrix to watch and the other half of Alice in Wonderland to read, and another whole season of Denise Richards.

Jumpin' right in.

So what's going on, crew? How was Black Friday? I was safely locked away inside a scrapyard listening to Pandora. I think I've finally reached the year where I am not excited to hear Christmas music on the radio. I still like Christmas music - I like the Christmas music I grew up with, but there is just SO. MUCH. terrible Christmas music on the radio that it's a painful experience no matter what time of day I turn it on. I mean, it has to be, because there are only about 90 Christmas songs, total. I mean it. If each song is 3 minutes (and some are less), that comes out to

*math*

and that is no where close to 24 hours. So radio stations have to accept every awful singer's rendition of every awful song, and they have to play every modern song all these famous people's people are throwing down onto legal pads drenched with flopsweat in the waiting rooms of recording studios, desperately trying to come up with something, anything, that will make more money, ill-got or otherwise.

And as a result of all this hustle, we have songs like Christmastime in Washington, Feed the World, and that F*CKING EAR-RAPING NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST CTHULU SUMMONING KRAKEN FILLED CESSPOOL Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime, a song which upends all my noble ideas about gun control every time I hear it. And this is December's radio. No, this is December and the last two weeks of November's radio. 97.1 started earlier than ever this year, on the weekend BEFORE Thanksgiving. 101.9 had the decency mercy? quiet but detectable malice to start 12:01 a.m. on Thanksgiving day.

What else do we Baltimoreans get to listen to, now that two acceptable stations have been slain? 101.1, which is so riddled with Nickelback and Linkin Park landmines that it's just not worth it. 104.3, which plays a total of 10 songs "sung" by a total of 4 "artists". Our only refuge is commercial free, listener supported 89.7, which is usually great, but I've been getting far too much hilbilly bluegrass gospel lately, and the pledge drive alarm is starting to go off in the back of my head. PLEASE, 89.7, don't pledge drive during Christmas. Think of the children. The children who drive to work every day.

How did I get on this? I don't even remember. Ah, Pandora. Blissful, wonderful internet radio. You never let me down. Although, you know what? I realize all my complaints are very 2002. Really, I do. What with satellite radio and iPods and stuff, why am I even complaining? Call me old-fashioned, if you must. I still listen to the radio. I think it's a good idea that I don't want to go away. I want the old radio days to come back. But radio today is becoming more and more a symptom of this current generation that supposedly has a negative attention span, where 10 "songs" by 4 "artists" is all they can handle. I was reading Alice in Wonderland last night because I don't remember if I've actually read it (probably have, and I thoroughly encourage re-reading anything), and I thought to myself, "jesus, no kid I know would EVER be able to sit through even the first chapter of this." And that's depressing, because Alice in Wonderland is a fantastic, fabulous, earth-shatteringly wonderful piece of children's literature, and at one point, little children even read it BY THEMSELVES.

But Christmas and all its music is upon is once again and fun shall be had by all, even us atheists. I've been asked in the past how atheists justify celebrating religious holidays if we don't believe in what they represent. First of all, forgive me for divorcing the act of putting a tree in my living room and hanging lights on it from the holy birth of your Lord. Second, just about all the Christian holidays are superimposed onto pagan holidays (harp, harp, yes, everybody knows) and you've divorced yourself from what they represent, so we're not so different, you and I.

I remember Christmas as a kid. How amazing. My poor parents would drag all the boxes out of the attic and put them in the middle of the floor and my brother and I would attack them, putting every stupid thing with a piece of glitter out and somewhere in the house, from little porcelain santa clauses to a huge stuffed reindeer that got shuffled from room to room because it was so big and inconvenient, but we HAD to have it out. If we didn't, I'd imagine all the poor Christmas decorations that didn't make the cut, sweating it out all year long in a box in an attic, making tic marks on the inside of the box as to when they'd get to come out again, only to be pulled out for half a second, declared to be ugly, and thrown back in for another year of waiting. Pulls my soul apart just thinking about it now. Now that I'm grown up, though, I know exactly what my parents were thinking with each tacky thing that came out of that box: "One more thing to put away later. Stellar." I mean, I think that now, when I'm trying to convince myself to put on a clean shirt. If I ain't using it, I sell it. Go make tic marks inside somebody else's box.

But once the tree was up and all that tacky stuff was out and the lights were on and it was juuuuuuust dark enough outside and it was Friday night so there was no school tomorrow, I would sit on the couch and the tree would be lit up, and I'd be surrounded by Christmas throw pillows and stuffed knock-off reindeer with green noses, and it would be the most amazing feeling. And then, mom would put on some of that GOOD Christmas music, like Johnny Mathis (don't hate) or the Nutcracker Suite, and life was a pure, perfect, untroubled pool of mercury that reflected all good things and was going to last forever.

I really want that feeling back. I want it back not just at Christmas, but all the time. I had it my last two years of college, when books were begging me to read them and post-it labels were quivering with excitement at the thought of being used. Then I lost it for a long time, and nothing inanimate had much to say for a while. Now I think things are getting ok, because I quit my awful stressful job, started working at a scrapyard 3 days a week, and books are starting to talk to me again. Going to bookstores on my budget is almost unbearable, everybody's hollering at me and I have to make all these promises I don't know if I can keep. That's how I got Alice in Wonderland the other day. It sat demurely on the special table with all the grandfather books, like Wuthering Heights and Kafka's Metamorphosis, and cleared it's throat a little when I walked by. I was impressed with it's restraint.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas didn't say a word, but it did glare at me, and I am the kind of person who allows myself to be intimidated by books. So I got it too.

But anyways. Merry Christmas, y'all. And if anybody has any idea what to get a computer scientist for Christmas, please chime in.