mini-updates and coffee. And an emo rant.

The other night I met my first white cabdriver who, incidentally, also lived in central harlem. He said he was Israeli and that he'd gotten into cabdriving two weeks ago because his friend told him he could make a lot of money, but that so far he hadn't found that to be true.

The landlord yelled at my next-door neighbor for playing his damn music so loud into all hours of the night. Finally a little peace and quiet on that side ... but the church partiers across the street are another story.

Currently I'm reading "Mortified! Real Words, Real People, Real Pathetic." Basically it's a bunch of grown-ups who sent in entries from their teenage diaries, and what results is bloody brilliant because it's so true. When you *are* that age, you think that you are a huge dork and that everyone is judging you and that no one could possibly be as emo as you secretly are, until you grow up and realize that everyone, to some degree, was once a huge emo dork. (In my diary I had a running section on the "7th Grade Soap Opera," where I would give the rundown of who was dating whom that week. And of course it changed every week, sometimes multiple times).

Lately Starbucks has gotten a lot of publicity for their new plan to make coffee that, like, tastes good. which only serves to highlight the point that plain old starbucks coffee is, in fact, absolutely terrible. There are rumors in some circles that it's bad on purpose so customers opt for expensive girly latte drinks instead. I mean, seriously — you have to dump at least three sugars into it just to curb the bitter taste, and the utter futility of adding skim milk to it gives me an excuse to put whole milk in my coffee.

Mind you, the fact that it's terrible doesn't stop me from drinking it. Hell, Starbucks coffee got me through many, many morning college classes and post-obscenely-late-deadline Spectator workdays. I think the bitterness and rocket-fuel consistency give it a kind of placebo effect where it makes me feel a little extra buzzed.

I miss Holiday coffee. On that note, I miss my Holiday gas station and the man who was always behind the counter when I came in at 6:47 a.m. before every single Leader-Telegram shift, without fail, except for the ones where I overslept. (I don't miss working at 7 a.m.) Every time I fry eggs I miss my kitchen on Menomonie Street where the floor was so slanted that both eggs would slide to one side of the pan. I miss making pancakes the morning after a crazy night. I miss dancing in front of the mirror that was in Nikki's room that makes you look skinny. (I don't miss my 7x12 bedroom.) I miss the ho box and redundant water street bars and kicking it with whoever happened to be in our living room at the time. (I do not miss the living room furniture). And I miss Jeff and Jim's. No slice of pizza in this city will ever be Jeff and Jim's.