Well, I was supposed to have a half a day off today but two members of our six-person team decided to be sick today. I hate them now.
I went to the new non-Barnes & Noble Starbucks near my house on the way to work this morning. Now, let’s get one thing clear right now. I don’t like coffee. I like girly stuff: hot chocolate, hot Blackberry & Sage tea with lots of fake sugar. I don’t like coffee. It tastes too adult. The few times I’ve dallied with coffee involved a cup half-full of French Vanilla Cappuccino and half Hot Chocolate, which has exactly three drops of actual coffee in it. I don’t like coffee.
But the new Starbucks doesn’t have any of the high maintenance girly non-coffee coffees. And it’s a drive thru, so I couldn’t ask for a big foo-foo drink. I ended up getting a Mocha Latte and drove off singing ‘mocha chocolatte’ Creole lady marmalade’!.’
First sip’ yech. Way too espresso-ish for me but lovely and warm just the same. I drove one-handed for a bit, relishing the warmth on my frozen fingers. I took another sip. Ok, it wasn’t that bad. It grew on you. I took another sip and was lulled by the heady charms of the dark chocolate. Mmmmm. It transformed from nasty coffee taste to velvety liquid dark cocoa, a kind of hot chocolate on testosterone. I sipped some more. I started to sing loudly with my Weezer CD. I was smiling. I was grooving. Then I heard a noise. It was the sound of my teeth vibrating. Apparently, Starbucks Mocha WhateverItWas has a little more caffeine than my normal morning Diet Coke.
I was buzzed to the gills, baby!
The Starbucks guy is my new boyfriend. I’m thinking of making him a mixed CD.
So my kitchen is covered in more fine white powder than the morning after a party at Whitney Houston’s house.
They’ve done a lot of priming on the walls, but now Esteban declared that he wants some kind of texture on it, so we’re back to stage whatever it is. Two steps back, just when the end was in sight. However, it is blindingly white in the kitchen.
The rest of the house has degenerated into a quasi-frat house look. There are two large boxes in our living room that formerly contained various Esteban-related electronic items. The computer of someone sits in front of our sofa. There are no less than six pairs of my shoes in the living room. I am so ashamed. Chelsea has taken to sleeping on top of Esteban’s coat because it’s covering her normal spot in front of the heat register. It looks as though chimpanzees live in our home.
My mother is doing a lot of work on the house as well. She’s multi-faceted and very talented with the home improvements when she puts her mind to it. I was ashamed to find that she scrubbed out my sink and toilet the other day. I had been letting it go to hell. It is All That Is Not Kitchen and it is amazing to what point Esteban will ignore the strange modern art configurations of mold in the toilet bowl. You’d think, with the very nature of standing and peeing, that he’d get fed up with it far faster than I, who simply looks at the magazine rack for every potty excursion. Sometimes I cease to care and the toilet begins to resemble a Jackson Pollock original. Apparently, it was all too much for my mother to bear and she felt compelled to clean it.
I am 30 years old and my mom is scrubbing out my toilet.
And the worst part is that there is a strange trail of white footprints throughout the house, in the shape of my feet. I continue to walk through the white dust when I go to the basement to do laundry and then I track it throughout the house. It has become sort of a housekeeping Lady MacBeth stain upon my soul. Or soles, maybe.
I think I’m coming down off the caffeine. I’m becoming maudlin.
