From the spot where I plant my butt each morning to drink coffee, watch the morning news, check my email, and otherwise waste away the first hour of every morning provided this view today. Normally I don't open the blinds until afternoon, but this one was never closed last evening - I went to bed and was fast asleep by 9:45 - and thus I caught the first rays of the day hitting the back fence. I looked to my left and discovered the digital camera; thus I have this moment captured. Speaking of captured moments, it occurs to me this morning that blogs, MySpace pages, and now Facebook and a dozen others I have yet to learn about - these things are all about trying to capture something fleeting. If I think too hard about this, I would do nothing else but chronicle every second in every way possible. Perhaps this is why I don't spend much time on the internet itself; sure, I e-mail and blog, and occasionally get a giggle out of Happy Tree Friends or Angry Alien, but generally, it always feels overwhelming. Meridith mentioned somewhere on something I read today that she spends more time on Facebook than MySpace. I learned about this Facebook thing in London, when all of the DU study abroad students were chattering endlessly one day on the Tube. I signed up for it so I could look at their pages as requested, but I haven't looked at it or thought about it since. For fun, I looked into it this morning and it turns out every person I seem to know in the world is on it - I had a dozen "friend requests" from people I know and have known a long time. How did I not know this section of the world existed? I immediately navigated back to my little blog where I can breathe deeply in my decade-old environment where I cannot "throw" something at someone - what this means I can't imagine but I'm sure it's silly fun but I don't have time to figure it out. It would be just one more thing to distract me.
Which reminds me. I'm reading Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby yet again because I'm teaching it this week in my fiction course. One of the things he perseverates upon in this one is the obsession we have with noise and distraction - he talks about how Orwell got it all wrong: it isn't that Big Brother is watching us constantly; he's filling our time and our consciousness with endless chatter noise to keep us so distracted we don't care. Chuckie may have a point there.
Whilst watching the sun rise in my back yard, I am drinking my coffee from a Gloria Jean's coffee mug, sans milk because we're out. I haven't had black coffee in so long and while I prefer my coffee au lait, it does remind me of my previous lives. Gloria Jeans. Sigh. I never worked there but it was round the corner from Prints Plus in the Westminster Mall and it was sadly all we had when starting work at 9:30 in the morning seemed early. The job of framing cheap posters in plastic composite frames for minimum wage in a mall full of mall-public during the winter holidays probably doesn't sound fun to most, but most of the time I loved working there. I always liked the idea of creating something out of nothing and giving it to someone who would appreciate it; I liked that the job required none of my thinking to be done and thus my mind was my own at all times. I miss that; I love teaching and I love school in general, but it's perfectly exhausting to use your brain all day, to be expected to be always "on" and to say intelligent or insightful things. To be responsible for thinking for everyone else too. It's more tiring than any physically demanding job I've ever held to be sure. If it hadn't been for that print-framing job, I'd never have met Jamison. That silly little mall store changed my life, and sipping out of a Gloria Jean's mug reminds me of it quite fondly. I cried the day we shut the gate forever and emptied the store, but Jamison came by to kiss me in the spot where we met.
On the news there was some spot about Starbucks, and while I want desperately to hate this company, I don't. Living in the burbs offers no coffee coolness and I admit that it's lovely to have a Starbucks within a stone's throw in any direction where I can sit in a comfy chair, grade papers, and drink my Earl Grey and milk in the afternoon and pretend I'm in London and not Northglenn. I also love that they spend their corporate money on ventures and causes I believe in, and that they have decent policies and benefits for their employees. I could even possibly work there if it wasn't so standardized. Making coffee drinks is its own kind of personal art and I cannot abide the precisely timed (not personally evaluated) espresso shots and the burnt coffee beans. Having said that, though, when I'm abroad and feeling a little out of sorts - which I do despite my joy at being abroad - I find Starbucks enormously comforting the same way I find The Simpsons on at supper time comforting. It reminds me that I haven't left the planet and that some rituals can be maintained no matter where I am in the world. Technology will never do this for me; I guess I'm slipping out of modernity. At least I'm in step with the 20th century, I suppose.
3 comments:
i love the line about sitting in St. Arbuck's drink earl grey and pretending you're in england and not northglenn! funny. cruising through your blog while checking out other colorado blog people.
Thanks for popping in! I always think that blogs are strangely anti-social and it's cool (and yet sad) that Starbucks is a connecting factor for us Ha.
when you connect on the right blogs, it is very social. twitter is cool, too. it really is a great way to network. *sips earl grey* there are SO many anonymous blogs out there that receive no traffic and operate as journals for the writers. there are other people who pimp their blogs a lot, get a lot of traffic and create a sense of community. agree?
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