mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

soak it up

This morning I went to Starbucks for my semi-weekly unsweetened iced coffee with soy milk. Yes, iced coffee is easy enough to make at home but I don’t want it at home, I want it at work, I want it handed to me by a sleepy-looking indie-rock boy with terrible scruffy facial hair, and I want it in my special straw mug that gets me a whole ten cents off. (By the way, if you buy coffee-shop coffee with any regularity and don’t bring your own cup, I judge you. I see the same people every time I stop in, getting their disposable cups probably on the daily, and it really brings out the finger-wagging Green-Party-grandma in me. FOR SHAME.)

So anyway, sometimes I give the ‘Bucks some of my cash and I’m not going to defend it. Except I just did.

One of the main sleepy-looking bad-beard boys is starting to recognize me, and as he filled my cup with iced coffee and added the soy he gave me a quick hey-baby nod and said, “Fellow vegan?”

“No!” I said. Probably too quickly. As if he had said, “Dogfucker?” Or “Phish fan?” I didn’t mean to imply that being vegan was wrong or anything. I’m just not vegan. I like the soy milk because it’s vaguely sweet, and I need some kind of bitter-reducer but Starbucks syrup is disgusting. I guess what I’m saying is that we shouldn’t ASSUME things about people. OKAY?

For instance. If you had been following me on the rest of my Starbucks-to-office walk (get away from me, creep!), you might ASSUME that I am a crazy person who likes to loudly remark on things. But sometimes I can’t help it! On Kinzie, by a defunct steakhouse, a big fat rat ran right across the outdoor patio and around the corner! Big fat rat! In the daytime! So of course I have to yell, “It’s a rat! HELLO RAT!” I mean what else are you going to do.

A woman walking behind me said, “Ugh! So disgusting!” after I yelled my happy yell about the rat, and I didn’t beat her up or anything but I was sort of offended on the rat’s behalf. He doesn’t know he’s vermin. It is kind of uncool to call any animal disgusting. They are just doing their thing, man.

Even post-rat, I apparently was not done walking around exclaiming about things, because just one block later a car went screaming by with lights and sirens. It was a sedan marked POSTAL POLICE.  Which led me to exclaim, “HURRY! Postal emergency!” The rat-insulting woman had nothing disparaging to say about the postal police, though. She may have been afraid of me by that point. Or maybe she knows that it’s a bad idea to go around dissing the postal police. I bet they are real touchy about their job not being taken seriously, and will shoot a motherfucker for making jokes about it. They do carry guns. And maybe really sharp letter openers, or poison stamps.

Once I got to work I went to go put my lunch away and noticed that someone had brought a gallon ziploc bag nearly half-full of chicken salad. Not a container. A bag. What kind of depressing hobo glops a huge amount of mayonnaisey salad into a bag and then doesn’t even have the proper shame-response to at least hide it inside another bag? I did not exclaim aloud about the bag of chicken salad, but I am eyeing all my coworkers with suspicion, and the memory of its squishy presence has been haunting me all day.

A CONFESSION

Next week marks fifteen years of this online diary thing, and I have been toying with the idea that maybe that is quite enough, thank you. In fact, I had not updated in so long that I sat down to type a mic-drop “thanks for the memories”-style entry, but then this crap came out instead. So maybe I’m not quite done yet? I don’t know.

—mimi smartypants is to blame.