Saturday, Apr. 19, 2003 - 12:17 p.m.

wearing: W&L Law sweatshirt, jeans that I just noticed are getting a hole in the butt
in car CD player: still Doolittle
hey, Grampa! what's for dinner? Starbucks croissant, better than usual--they must have changed suppliers

hoppin' down the bunny trail

Today I went to the Starbucks just up the street from my office for the first time in forever. I used to go there every single day until I started planning the W.T., but after that, making my own damn coffee seemed to be one of the easiest possible cost-cutting measures even if it meant that I'd have to sit on my own boring couch to write and wouldn't have nice Larry Hovis-looking barista boy to bring me cheesecake like he was actually my own personal waiter. This morning I was actually up early, though, and decided to commemorate that fact by going there and caffeinating up before coming in here to the office and getting caught up on stuff I didn't get done yesterday afternoon because Dave let everybody out early for Good Friday. (It started pouring rain about 4:00 yesterday afternoon. I was meeting with Dave at the time. He looked out the window and said, "Man, Jesus is going to get pretty cold up there on that cross in His underwear," and then observed that he was probably going straight to Hell for that.)

What I had sort of forgotten is just how annoying that Starbucks is on weekend mornings, because it's all full of Summerlin people having lattes before they go off and do expensive sporty things. I don't understand why I'm so repelled any more by people who are basically my age, and went to colleges roughly comparable (or possibly less Preppy) than my own, who sit in Starbucks on weekend mornings with their immaculately-dressed children talking on their cell phones as they sit there in their expensive impractical faux-exercise clothes in their makeup with their ugly painted fingernails. I didn't mind bowheads when I was a Hollins student because I just thought they were kind of an amusing subculture. But, at the time, it was easy for me to put on bowhead costume and fake being one of them. Now, 12 years later, there's a huge divide that separates me from those women, and it's not predicated solely on my failure to understand why it's necessary to wear unflattering lipstick all the freaking time. Even worse are the whole families of professional dad-who-golfs and dynamic mom-who-volunteers-and-does-power-yoga and kids-who-will-grow-up-to-apply-to-W&L, because they seem so self-delusional to me, like everything's always going to be perfect and all obstacles are always going to be surmountable. Sitting at the table next to mine was one of those families--the overly tan dad (who was bald, which made his head look like the top of a brioche), the sporty mom in velour "warm-up" suit and lots of gold jewelry, the 17-year-old extremely good-looking son in his Abercrombie clothes and puka-shell necklace, and then this little girl--I guess she was probably 11 or so--she had freckles and a turned-up nose and a Hollinsy haircut and a headband! and a fabulous suede jacket, and she sat there with a stuffed duck and hugged it and talked to it while her brother and parents talked about something that clearly bored the shit out of her. After a while she went over and sat on the brother's lap and he didn't mind it. If I was the mom in that family I would be a nervous wreck all the time, knowing that any minute, something could go terribly wrong--one of the kids could get hit by a car; somebody could be diagnosed with leukemia; we could all be tortured and shot by home-invasion robbers; one of the cats could die; the son could start showing early symptoms of schizophrenia; the daughter could be raped by a classmate or a neighbor; the husband could get sued for professional malpractice; the son could be seduced by a horny older single woman who put the moves on him one day at Starbucks; etc. This mom actually did have a sling on that was bound up in a way that indicates to me that she had a fractured collarbone, but I'm sure she got it some fun way, like taking a header whilst lunging to make a return shot on the tennis court.

Wow, I'm so positive today! Why, yes, I have a sinus headache so excruciating it's making me feel like severing my own head with a letter opener. And the sooner I get this report written, the sooner I can go home and bury my face in one cat or another and make it that much worse and that much better at the same time.

previous - next

5.2.03--all packed up and nowhere to go yet - Friday, May. 02, 2003
5.1.03--the home stretch! - Thursday, May. 01, 2003
4.21.03--novel concepts - Monday, Apr. 21, 2003
4.19.03--this is not my beautiful wife - Saturday, Apr. 19, 2003
4.18.03--like chickens before their heads are cut off - Friday, Apr. 18, 2003

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