Isn’t it bad enough having to go home for the holidays, listening to the incessant naggings of your parents asking you what it is that you’re planning on doing with the rest of your life, while they still act like you’re sixteen and fail to recognize that you’ve literally been living on your own in a city for the past four and a half years, that when you wake up in the morning after a night of drinking downtown at over priced bars with everyone you’ve ever graduated from high school with, talking to you as you think to yourself, who is this? and you nod and smile anyway because they seem to know/remember a lot about you and you can’t, for the life of you, remember their first names, that you have to sluggishly, head pounding from $10 vodka sodas, make your way downstairs and open the cabinets of your childhood kitchen to see the worst thing in the world you could ever imagine seeing sitting before you: decaf.
Out of anger and the knowledge that you won’t be able to function for the rest of the day without it, you drive in search of it. No Starbucks around the corner on Huntington, or up Mass Ave or down the street in the Prudential Center. No. At home you sacrifice, and speeding in your clothes from the previous night that you slept in and have yet to take off, all you see are pink and orange signs that radiate the horrible stench of sugary liquid that people keep insisting on calling coffee.
Dunkin Donuts is ruining my life. Well, it ruined my holiday at least and while it’s normal to see a Dunks on every street corner in the Dunkin Donuts-loving-Boston, going home and seeing new ones popping up everywhere makes my heart start to race from panic much like the effect of a doppio espresso macchiato.
Are we really sacrificing quality for speed and pastels that don’t even match?
All I know is that after four days of withdrawal it’s good to be back in the city, where at least both establishments are represented equally. And if Freddy Ferrer is right, and there are two types of New Yorkers, just call me part of the java leisure class, part of the “BlackBerry-packing, Prada-wearing megalopolis” sans the Berry and Prada.
I’m a daughter of the Cleaver characters, who paid too much for a college education and is currently being underpaid in an entry-level job that I’m overqualified for, packing my own lunch to save up for Starbucks, the rocket fuel for the people who do the city’s really hard work-clutch our hot white and green cups tightly with the aspiration that someday, we too, might be lucky enough to get paid for hardly doing any work at all.
She keeps me up. The woman outside in the alley that we call the lobby as if it were a real room to the people who find parts of their lives in the parts that other people have thrown away.
The check out man at the camera store is leafing through a tabloid and I wonder if he’s bought it on his own or if he’s really interested. The guy behind me nudges me in line, I move forward. Everyone’s interested he says and asks me what my name is and then tells me my pictures were good. Are good. I feel nervous that he looked even though everyone knows that the man who develops looks.
Like I look at the woman outside in the alley that we call the lobby as if it were a real room. He tries to sell me a photo album and I tell him I’m not a photographer and only photographers should put their pictures on display. Like the three men who bought me drinks on Saturday night but none of them were the right ones. Men or the drinks. More of things I don’t need.
I’m dreading going home. Too much food and too much family and not enough space or time. Time is flying, and the more there is the less there is and I wish I was back on the Vineyard
I’ll be sure to take some more shocking pictures soon so the check out man at the camera store can have a little more fun.
I will take tylenol pm (extra strength) tonight so that the woman in the alley doesn’t keep me up.
I could hear it even though the air was cold and the trees were almost bare. I could hear what it would be like in the hot July heat, the masses of people de-barking the ferry, carrying coolers and bags and children, looking forward to a weekend in the sun.
Only now, in reality, all I can hear are people shouting “taxi!” as Sweet Girl and I walk through the Vineyard Haven parking lot to the bike rental shop around the corner.
Fitted to beautiful bright blue bikes that make me feel like I’m a little girl again, we head down the coast: Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, Tisbury. Our thighs start to burn ascending the steep hills, but the brisk breeze in our hair and the feeling of lightness that overcomes us as we coast down the other side makes it okay.
We stop at a small used bookstore in an old converted barn that smells like history and feel the first edition copy of the Complete Poems of Robert Frost, 1949, inscribed in fading pen: to Jane, with love. Good fences make good neighbors.
The island feels smaller than it is, we think, because the city is so large. Down at the empty beach we get sand in our shoes and wonder where the summer went. Lifeguard chairs no longer on duty, blankets and umbrellas stored away until the onset of the first 70-degree-day. It feels like a lifetime away.
We pedal past small streets and large shingled houses, down brick sidewalks and wooden docks where boats rock lonely, abandoned, dreading the winter and awaiting next spring.
We find sustenance at a small café, re-charging for the 10+ mile bike ride back. At the Edgartown lighthouse I tell Sweet Girl that we should buy a lighthouse, to which she responds, you mean one of those little ones? Like a paperweight? I say no, a real one, thinking that the weight of everyday life is something that perhaps owning something like a lighthouse could lift. Thinking that being lost myself, I could take solace in the ability to guide other people in the right direction, to bring them safely home.
The sky turns orange and purple and we say how we never see anything like this in the city. We dread returning, feeling comforted by the off-season Vineyard, feeling that life is simple here, that it makes sense. Tomorrow we both have to work in the city and are dreading a return to normalcy. What if we stay? We ask ourselves. What if we get jobs here, become locals, leave the bright lights and hurried crowds of the metropolis behind? What if? What if, what if, what if.
We board the last ferry, tired, and watch the island disappear into darkness, for we know that we have promises to keep, and miles to go before we sleep.
1.) Let’s start off by saying that Starbucks, after our little domestic dispute last week, has heeded my warning and the way I see it is no longer the way anyone is seeing anything. Holiday cups have been introduced this very morning (in Boston at least). My first glimpse of someone holding the beloved red cup on my walk to work invoked a smile in me (hard pressed as I was after a 15 hour work day yesterday). 2.) Just when you think the French can’t get any more ridicule, they go and top themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I love France. My best friend is French and if I could, I would live permanently in Paris, looking the other way at the fact that I would be living with crazy Socialists and that with the slightest physical ailment I could conceivably die because their health care system is as infamé as their manners and La Pantranque.
“You know what really pisses me off? They never EVER acknowledge the fact that there is a strong military presence of the French in Afghanistan.”
My French friend is right, naturellemon. Why is it that we have this mental image in our heads of the French not caring about what’s going on with the war? We picture them over there all day just sitting around with funny hats on, eating leek soup and drinking pastis, saying, war?! Quelle surprise!
Either way, one has to wonder how long this will go on for. After all, it’s the French fighting the French, and the only question one can’t help but ask is: who is going to surrender first?
3.) The deadline for columnist submissions for an online magazine is this weekend. I’ve been working hard to get this sucker out all week that hopefully, it will be brilliant (1,170 words and 5 days of work it had better be). However, I have a feeling this will end up like most of the things I spend time writing and sending out: left neatly saved on my newly acquired key drive, a reminder of the things I’ve tried that haven’t worked out.
4.) Will be sure to drink heavily tonight with Sweet Girl at our weekly Pig outing in an attempt to forget about this rigorous work week and drowning my lost hopes for publication in the strong vodka sodas that Matt the bartender makes for me at half price.
And anyway, it’s like Audrey Hepburn said in Sabrina in 1954, there’s always Paris.
"The Way I See It" on Starbuck’s coffee cups. I’m especially over #61. "Imagine we are all the same. Imagine we agree about politics, religion and morality. Imagine we like the same types of music, art, food and coffee. Imagine we all look alike. Sound boring?" No. Sounds like a typical morning at Starbucks. Perhaps they should stop preaching on their cups of overpriced coffee with this holier-than-thou ad campaign and just let me enjoy my grande bold in peace.
We are all the same. We’re all in the same place needing this drug to get through our days. We agree that the only outlet to learn about politics is the NYT, and depending on where you are, perhaps one other local newspaper. Our religion is our coffee and we practice it as faithfully as anyone can, almost genuflecting when it’s our turn to order. We give it our daily attention and our hard earned money, not even looking at the price anymore as we have given in, sleepily handing over our debit cards, sigh, scan, wait, listen, would you like your receipt? look of horror, proof?! never.
Our morality is: if its been left on the bar, unclaimed by whomever’s name is written incorrectly and illegibly on the side of the cup in black permanent marker, for longer than five minutes, it’s up for grabs.
We like Coldplay, Dylan and Alanis (apparently more now that she has gone acoustic). We like local artists’ photography that is preferably in black and white, promoted shamelessly and is grossly overpriced. We like cinnamon scones and plain bagels and blueberry muffins and we all look like we’re over-worked and under-paid, and not getting enough sleep or happiness, enough dates, love, credit, passion, reality tv, truth, goodmovies,goodbooksgoodsex.
The way I see it, (#62, say) is that if I wanted to learn (as if it’s a thing one can ‘learn’) about diversity, I wouldn’t want to educate myself about it from a non-recyclable paper cup, warming me, careful! the beverage I’m about to enjoy is extremely hot, from a place whose corporate corruptness of marketing to the monotonous masses has taken over, not only the world, but apparently how we should see it as well.
This is the author’s opinion, not necessarily that of Starbucks.
