On Not Being Rewarded

My wife's no sitcom character, but she does have theme music, a character wardrobe, and catchphrases.

My wife's theme music is the soundtrack to "Amelie." It's pixie-like, precious, precocious, and it's the soundtrack to the first film she ever suggested I watch. And, come to think of it, it may very well have been the only film she ever suggested I watch. My sweet wife tromps through life with a charming air about her, an Audrey Tautou-esque air about her. Bright, lovely, at times blithely unaware of her surroundings-- you almost expect a garden gnome to send her a postcard from Denmark.

Her wardrobe is from Anthropologie. Color-dappled skirts, bright red overcoats with huge buttons, embellished tops in kind hues-- she is always dressed for delightful adventure, wherever she goes, and I am always interested in seeing what she chose to wear on a given morning-- because, damnit, it's fun.

And she has her catchphrases. Some of them are old standbys, but one has developed recently, and I think it's a funny one, because, on its face-- it's quite absurd. Whenever my dear Mrs. Apron gets fucked over by Life, as all of us do, she likes to say, "I feel like I'm not being rewarded right now."

This is going to sound awfully condescending, and I apologize, to you and to my wife, in advance, but I find this catchphrase of my wife's terribly funny, as I mentioned earlier, and charming at the same time. The catchphrase is used whenever my wife does what she perceives to be "the right thing" and then ends up getting the proverbial pie in the face. Perhaps being proactive and taking the dogs out for a walk and then having Molly poop on the floor not five minutes after retuning from the walk. Maybe taking a shortcut only to have the misfortune of driving behind a Toyota Camry with a leather-faced codge-ass behind, his wool Fedora barely poking up from view behind the headrest.

Of course you're not being rewarded, silly. Nobody gets rewarded. Only pathetic, untalented, tow-headed children on local township soccer teams get trophies. The rest of us get a punch in the schnuts.

On Monday, I had off from work. I awoke semi-erect and with an intense craving for a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich from a local bagelry establishment. And coffee that I didn't have to make myself. So I dressed, walked the dogs quickly, got in my car, and drove off.

It was a little after 9:00am by the time I hit the road-- prime time for all the elementary school buses to fuck up everybody's commute/bagel sandwich run. It took me twenty minutes to get to the the bagel place, (should have taken ten) but I didn't care, because I had a coupon!!!!

AND I REMEMBERED IT!!!!!!!!

I even remembered my super-cool, keeps-hot-beverages-hot-for-nine-hours coffee mug!

What I forgot, I realized as I pulled into the parking space at the bagel store, was my wallet.

See, this is what happens when you change trousers. We should just wear the same pair all week, then this wouldn't happen. It's not like we, most of us, dookie ourselves. How are our trousers somehow unacceptably dirty after one day? Come on. Give me a break.

I had remembered, during my quick dressing session, to remove my belt and put it on the new pair of trousers, put my cellphone and clip on the new pair, too. But the wallet, well, that didn't make it in.

I wanted to give up. But I couldn't. So I drove all the way home, stormed upstairs, got the wallet, and drove back to the fucking store.

I placed my order and presented my coupon.

"Oh," the topographically pimpled clerk behind the counter frowned as he pointed to my coffee travel mug, "if you're using that, I can't accept the coupon."

I feel like I'm not being rewarded right now, Tom, I wanted to say to him. Instead, I just looked at him. And I blinked three times.

"You know what-- forget it. That's stupid. Nevermind," he said. I wanted to kiss the angry, red bumps on his cheeks. Reason had prevailed. Logic had won the day at this crummy little establishment, at which, I might add, I was the only patron.

I could have gone on a torrential rant about how I'm not being rewarded for doing the environmentally friendly thing, by bringing my own mug and not using another insidious paper cup.

I could have done it.

But my wife would be the first one to tell you that I hate the environment. It's one of her catchphrases.

Please, Make Me Stop

I think I'm addicted to blogging.

And I know I'm addicted to coffee.

I don't like being an addict, and I suppose, having these two pesky little addictions, this is what I am.

Hi, I'm an addict and occasional asshole. Nice to meet you. Is there a 12-Step Program for me?

No, probably not.

I tried to give up coffee in graduate school, while I was taking (ha ha) an Intro to Addictions course in the psych department, because, as someone getting a MaEd, you are required to take one grad-level class outside of the education discipline. This class consisted of being lectured at by a very attractive professor, attending AA meetings in the community, and/or watching episodes of "Intervention."

Hi, welcome to my favorite grad school class. Nice to meet you. I am an addicthole.

Grad school was not the first or last time I tried to quit drinking coffee. I first tried in 2002, right after college. Fail. Then again, a couple years later. Fail. Then I tried to cut down to every other day. No. How about, just on the weekdays? Nuh-uh. Just on the weekends? Well... how about a couple packets of NO! Then, after a bout of heart-racing and several trips to the cardiologist's office (where every guy in their mid-twenties wants to be) I tried to do half decaff/half regular. Don't ask me why that didn't work-- probably because it was just too damn hard to always stock a bag of regular and a bag of decaffeinated grounds in the house, because, let's face it, that's way too hard for someone like me to do.

Plus, I didn't like saying, "half-caff" at Starbucks, because it made me sound like a retard who should be wearing a scarf, beret and an earring. I don't go like that. I'll say, "Please leave lots of room" but that's all I want to say to a barista. Anymore verbiage and I seriously start to hate myself.

Oh, and I also can't stop blogging. It's Friday as I write this now. The one for Saturday I pre-wrote an hour ago, and this one is auto-scheduled for 7:18am EST on Sunday, and I'm already thinking about what Monday's is going to be about and when I'm going to write it, since I have an orchestra rehearsal from 10am-1pm Saturday, then work from 3pm-11pm, and then work from 3pm-11pm again on Sunday. Sounds impossible, but there will be new content on Monday morning for you, just as sure is there will be coffee, sugared up and pissed off, surging through my veins and crashing against my temples when'er the sun doth rise.

God, I love being an addict.

No Coffee

I had my first cup of coffee when I was... eight, I think. It was regular, high-test, as they say in BP-parlance. Israelis don't wait around for silly things like, say, adolescence. Why wait, when your precious world and your precious family could be blown up tomorrow?

Coffee has become customary at my parents' home. It follows every meal, and it doesn't matter if it's 103 degrees out and the truculent sun is blazing through the imitation shoji window screens in the dining room-- there. will. be. coffee.

I expect it. My oldest sister demands it. Since her epiglottis or whatever got all fucked up a few years ago, she eats very, um, particularly, and coffee is her one real pleasure in life. Her vice. Her sanctity. Her holy water. And she laps it up as if she were crawling on the desert floor of the Kalahari for weeks and in that ceramic cup were the last drops of moisture in the world. She licks the mug. It's actually quite disgusting. They're not dainty little mint julip licks either. They're lusty, rye bourbon licks, tongue flat against the mug's interior. It's a bit like pornography, and watching your sister behave like that, at the dinner table no less, is a bit disconcerting.

But, hey-- it's coffee. Liquid gold.

A while ago, my wife alerted me to the fact that I don't actually like coffee. She evinced this by pointing out that I put enough sugar in my coffee to send the air molecules around the mug into a diabetic coma. "You like coffee-flavored candy-water," she said.

"Ah. You're probably onto something there," I said, re-filling the banana-yellow Fiestaware sugar bowl for the third time this week.

When dining at my parents' house, I don't always want coffee after the meal, but I always take it, because it's always offered, and a meal there just doesn't feel.... right without it. You know when something just doesn't feel right, don't you? A handshake, or a kiss-- a hello or a goodbye. Walking down an unfamiliar alley after the sun's set or buying a used mattress. Well, dinner at my parents' house without coffee sort of feels like that. It's foreign, or absurd. Maybe incomplete is more of what I'm looking for. A bit... off.

It's Rosh Hashanah today. We were all together at my parents' house-- me, my wife, my two sisters, my sister's husband, their beautiful baby boy, my father-in-law and, of course, my parents. A much bigger gathering than usual. There was chicken, Israeli-style sauteed vegetables and rice, pecan and apple pie and ice cream-- but no coffee. It just... didn't happen. The baby was uncustomarily cranky, with diaper rash on his tussie as we call it, and there was a flurry of activity to alternately quiet him and entertain him. There was hide-and-seek and chasing and the calming water of the bathtub and a quick jaunt to CVS by my father to get Desitin or Chèvre or whatever you rub on a baby's ass to get it to stop crying, and I had to leave to drive my father-in-law back to his car so he could get back to his job, and, when I came back, well, the opportunity had been missed.

It's funny how everything changes. My oldest sister mused, as there was jubilant banshee-like screaming (my mother) from the living room, what family dinners were like, you know, before.

"They couldn't have been this loud," she declared, her hand to her forehead.

"No, they were-- they just weren't cute loud," I replied, sinking into my old seat like a slice of bologna on bread. "This is what we always were, just more fucked up now."

Of course, there was always coffee-- to take the edge off.

Now there are new family members, both young and not quite so young, and sometimes they sit at our dining room table and sometimes, just sometimes, I can't quite always believe I'm staring at who's staring back at me, and sometimes, just sometimes, I'm pleasantly surprised at whom I'm staring, and sometimes I'm stunned or appalled or frightened or horribly pissed. And sometimes I actually catch myself staring, and remember that, if I'm very, very good, maybe-- just maybe, there'll be coffee again.

Starfuxme

I get indignant a lot.

Noticed that about me?

I don't like indignation, and I regret that it's a component of who I am, but at least I'm able to recognize it.

I caught myself getting indignant at Starbucks this morning, and I said to myself, "Apron, (I used my real name, because I was talking to myself and nobody could hear it), you're a bad boy."

And, sometimes, I just am.

I got indignant at Starbucks this morning because the woman in front of me ordered two Venti Lattes, both with extra shots of syrup, and some other complicated things that I couldn't even decipher as I craned my neck to read the order read-out monitor. In any case, her total came to $9.68, so you know there was some heavy shit going on there. Needless to say, the completion of this suburban mom-in-white-striped-pants' order took an inordinately long time to fill.

And I got indignant about that.

As this is a Starbucks located inside a supermarket (yes, go ahead and snigger at me derisively because I live in the suburbs-- I don't mind) there was only one person behind the counter and she wasn't exactly the sprightliest character ever to wear a green apron-- so, maybe I should have been indignant at the Starbucks worker, but I don't think so. I don't think she was the main problem here. I don't even think Mrs. Stripey is the problem, though I was getting a serious hate-on for her in the heat of the moment. I think Starbucks itself, the purveyor of complicated pseudocoffeeconcoctions is the guilty party.

I just wanted a coffee. A simple, straight, boring cup of coffee. Because I am a depressed, sleep-deprived caffeine addict who requires a certain amount of caffeine and sugar to maintain homeostasis, or else I will be a complete failure at work and at life, alternately growling at people and falling asleep at varied intervals. How much time does it take even a lethargic Starbucks employee to grab a cup, pour coffee into it and hand it over? 20 seconds? Sixteen? Eight?

Just give me my motherfuck joe, honey, and we can all walk away unharmed.

I think it should be a federal law that all Starbucks ought to be manned by two employees at minimum. One line should be for straight up coffee-drinkers. Nobody else. The second line can be for, you know, people who like lattes and shots and foam and whip and tiny umbrellas in their coffee or whatever. Let them all sweat it together. It's rather like the Express Lane at the supermarket. We've got a job to do, and we're going to do it quicker than you, so let us do that and leave us alone.

Also, at highway rest-stop Starbucks: no silly drinks allowed. Period. People traveling in the pouring rain on I-95 at 10:00 at night should not have to stand in a line for 20 minutes because people want gay, cute little drinks that take 4 minutes per customer to prepare. Want coffee? Here. Take it and get the fuck out of here.

Now this would be coffeetopia.

I'm Immature

I wasn't always immature, but I seem to be getting more so as I grow older.

It's supposed to work the opposite way, right?

When I was eight, I was watching Monty Python's Flying Circus, and emulating John Cleese's "city gent" characters by dressing in black three-piece suits and bowler hats. I had a vocabulary far elevated beyond my chronological years. In elementary school, I watched ABC Nightly News with my parents, or without them. I once held a mini tape-cassette recorder up to the television so that I could tape the ABC Nightly News theme music, because I liked the importance of the trumpets and the base drums.

I would sit at my desk in my bedroom, in a sport coat and tie and I would listen to the theme music alone in my room and pretend I was Peter Jennings until the tape wore out.

I was a fan of Bach's harpsichord concertti. I was writing letters to the Austrian government in defense of Antonio Salieri amidst rising speculations of his culpability in Mozart's death. I wrote to the Queen as a proponent of arming British police officers.

Buckingham Palace wrote back, addressing me as "Master," which I liked.

As I've grown older, though, I've begun to notice my maturity level sloping downward.

I routinely prance around the house squealing in a high-pitched manner, frequently wearing questionable amounts of clothing and behaving in an otherwise disordered way that would understandably leave one to believe that I was stored in an airtight container for most of my infancy. I talk to myself a lot, which is perhaps less a sign of immaturity and more a sign of impending insanity.

I'm ready for it.

I feel like my sense of humor is also deteriorating, perhaps tending towards the sophomoric. I wasn't very sophomoric when I was a sophomore, at least, I don't think I was. Nowadays, though, my antics would probably make a sophomore cringe.

Last night, in the supermarket, (where they sell pancake-wrapped sausage... "ON A STICK!") I was fumbling through the coffee aisle. Instead of buying Starbucks brand coffee, as is required by law, my eyes focused on a brand of coffee I had never seen before: "Peet's Coffee." I stopped and stared at the bag, in disbelief at the name of this particular flavor of Peet's Coffee.

"Major Dickason's Blend."

I mean, what are people thinking? According to some other numbnut's blog, a gentleman named Key Dickason, a retired Army officer (who was actually a Lieutenant) was a regular customer in Peet's Coffee's original coffee shop, and you could create your own blend there back in those days. So that's how this ridiculous thing got started, according to wikhistory.

If this is a true story, I really like how Key Dickason can promote himself from Lieutenant, skipping right over Captain, to fucking Major. So he can change his rank with no problem, but they leave his ridiculous name? That's just silly.

In the supermarket, I started imagining names for other Peet's Coffee blends:

Brevet Major-General Twat's Aroma

Lieutenant-General Grundle's Grounds

Colonel Crotchington's Coffee

Second Lieutenant Bumwhacker's Java

I immediately selected this brand, obviously for no other reason than the name, and showed it to Mrs. Apron.

"Major Dickason?" she said, one eyebrow dubiously raised, first at the package, then at me.

"Can you imagine if they combined with "Chock Full O' Nuts?" I asked, grinning from ear to sophomoric ear.

"Yeah, it'd be Major Dickason's Nuts." Well, I guess she's getting a little sophomoric, too. Must be contagious.

I immediately started cracking up in the market, because the formerly higher functioning components of my brain are obviously eroding/leaking. Maybe that's what earwax really is: brain sophistication detritus.

By the way, I don't know how I feel about Major Dickason's blend as a libation. I mean, it's wet and brown like all other coffee, but, to my sophomoric palate, it just tastes like sugar.