Sometimes I Miss Where I Used to Work

There was a month or two period there before quitting my job as a barista where I genuinely didn’t like what I did. I was frustrated with the people I interacted with daily, the management was in a strange and unsettled place, and Abbie and I both were looking, actively, had been looking, actively, for something to help us pay the bills come our marriage; neither of us had been successful in that yet. When I put in my notice and was prepared to leave for good, it was a freeing feeling. Knowing that I would be moving on to something better, knowing that the dead end I’d felt as though I was running into would soon be behind me and something better for me, better for Abbie, better for our marriage would be waiting ahead, made me feel as though I was finally getting my head around this whole “adult” thing.

But it didn’t last.

The Elusiveness of Productivity

Working in a coffee shop can be a slow life–at least where I work.  For every rushed moment of teenagers wanting milkshakes upon milkshakes, there are moments more where there is little to nothing happening at all, where the slow trickle of daytime patrons and study drunk students is the entire afternoon and the moments in between are left up to the person working to figure out what to do with.

Most of the time I write, I read, I draw, I do something so as to be, in some way, productive.  But every 20 shifts or so there comes a day where nothing quite clicks. The shift is slow and if it were set upon your heart to read a book, to write a book, to solve cancer, you could, but nothing begins quite right–nothing gets going, and five hours pass and there’s nothing to show for it except for some lonely face drawn poorly in a sketch book beside a balloon and flying hippopotamus.

That’s today.  It’d be nice if I were able to say that this post kickstarted the rest of my afternoon, that my writing this greased the wheels for something great to get going–but I’d be lying.  Productivity is elusive. It’s often times when you are most tired, most inconvenienced and least interested in actually doing something that the inspiration strikes, but it’s in times like this, where it’s been an hour since anyone’s come in and there’re $7 sitting in my tip jar, that I wish productivity would hurry up already and just get going.

Bloom: Janice in Accounting

“That’s life.”

“Life’s not fair.”

Those are probably two of the most overused phrases from adults who have only tried very little to understand what anyone else who is having any sort of issue may be struggling with (i.e. someone not getting a job when someone else at some point has had that same trouble, or…you know, something like that).  It’s lazy in a sort of way, to dismiss the troubles of someone else without taking the time to understand those troubles, to believe that because you can somewhat relate, you understand a person and what they’re going through; it’s a wrong way of thinking.

Life: The Art of Creating Opportunities

Post-college life is difficult.

Not because there is, or should be, anything about your life or mine that is exceedingly difficult to be in charge of and deal with (kids, bills, debt, health issues), but because there is an expectation placed upon us from the moment we graduate until we begin to adult that we should want nothing less and should aspire to nothing less than to fit into a mold of what it means to grow up.

Bloom: Why Do You Always Have to be Right??

“I would like a large Muddy Tiger, but, this time, with no milk added to the espresso. Thanks.”

That’s how it started, with what would be an otherwise innocuous sentence leading off an exchange that was largely confrontational, all for a single reason: wanting to be right.

Bloom: The One About Theft and Desperation

When I was younger I believed, rightly so, that the circumstances of my life were little or no different than the circumstances of the lives of the people around me. And I say “rightly so” because when you’re a kid growing up, that’s exactly how it should be.  You can’t drive, you can’t go out on your own, and the choices you make, however limited in scope, are for the most part arbitrary in nature, so the best thing going, and one of the only things at that, is your ability to be innocent.

Bloom: The One About Quality Control

 

Last Friday, a new Starbucks opened five minutes down the road from the coffee shop I work in and, my Lord, is it exciting.  Sort of.

Okay…kind of not.

Bloom: The One About the Weird People

 

There are a few things in life (well, more than a few) that are difficult to understand.  The mass appeal for mayonnaise comes to mind? I don’t get it. It’s jiggly, and gelatinous, and basically all fat; and why does everyone put it on everything?

Whip cream? Whip cream.  I don’t understand that either.  It’s literally air.  Cream air, that is in the way of what you actually want: the food/dessert that you actually ordered.

What else? Oh, cream cheese.  Like…whaaaaaat people?  Put jelly on your bagel and vanilla icing on your cakes and there–I’ve solved all your future breakfast orders and the wedding cake part of your marriage.

And…

I’m realizing that most of the things I don’t understand are food related catastrophes, but that doesn’t detract from my original point that there’re other confusing things too.  Chief of which are people.

Bloom: The One About the Local Coffee Shop

 

I’ve lived in the same town for my entire life.  Twenty-three years.  And while the more…southernly inclined would contest just how much a part of this area I really am, I grew up here (South Carolina by the way) and am, like it or not, a southerner.

I like it just fine, and the town I live in isn’t bad–Lord knows there are some worse ones nearby–but my mom grew up in St. Louis and then moved down here, so I can seem somewhat out of place.  I don’t say, “y’all,” I’ve never been hunting, grits, to me, are kind of gross, and the love affair that some have with the local “meat and threes” is little more than an acquaintanceship to me.  I’m a Yankee, in essence, but in truth I’m not–I’m something in between.

Regardless though, you came here to hear about a coffee shop we have here in town.  And if you didn’t, well, there’s a puppy post somewhere–just follow the resounding, “awwwwwww’s.”