i say, buffie...

I was doing some research for a homework assignment last night, and I came across what I think has got to be the preppiest thing I have ever seen in my life.

The pink... the logo... the tennis... the mind boggles at how perfectly it fits the stereotypes.

Sickly Sweet

This morning, as I often do of late, I walked over to the Dunkin Donuts across the street from my office building. I asked for a medium coffee with two sugars. I'm not sure what the woman thought I meant by two sugars, but my coffee is so sweet that I feel like my teeth are going to fall out if I keep drinking it -- and that's just the first sip, so I dare not think what the bottom of the cup tastes like. I really hate that DD requires that you let them fix your cup for you, like some fascist coffee house. I don't want to say "please put x amount of milk and x amount of sugar in my coffee" because they always screw it up, so I always just say "milk and two sugars" and hope they get it right, which they almost never do. Honestly, how hard is it? The Boston Coffee Exchange in South Station does the same thing -- when I go there I just ask for milk because they indiscriminately pour the milk out of this big pitcher and you wind up getting about 1/2 a cup of milk in your medium coffee, and at that point I don't need sugar.

New Additions

So few people read my blog. It's depressing. But for those of you who DO visit here every now and then, you will notice that I have added a few new things to the right of this page: a flickr link, and a list of my most recent del.icio.us tagged links. Now you can see how I waste my company's bandwidth at work. Hooray!

Eventually, look for a blog redesign. I am not a fan of templates, and the more I look at this one, the more I hate it. Also look for a redesign of my main webpage, which is in desperate need of spiffing. I am working on a webpage for a non-profit company right now which I will post a link to once it's done, and I am also in the initial stages of creating a website about web typography (past, present, and future) for my design class. Busy little bee, that's me.

PR, stat!

So the first thing I read this morning on CNN.com is a story about how Michael Brown is threatening to spill the beans about how the Bush administration really handled the New Orleans disaster. This is a weird story to begin with: he's basically saying "I'm gonna tell on you! (but only if you let me.)" So then, the next time I look at CNN.com, the headline story is "Bush Thwarts Major Disaster in LA." Um... huh? The timing is suspicious, to say the least. This was something that happened (or, um, didn't) four years ago. I can just see the White House PR department now -- "Brown said what? Get me a happy Bush story, now!"

In other news, Matt and I are going to Puerto Rico! End of March, 5 days/4 nights. I'm so excited, I barely know what to do with myself. We're staying at a resort in southwestern PR, near a town called Guanica. It's close to a large "Dry Forest" that's supposed to be a great place for birding. And it's got an all-inclusive package, which means that I can sit on the beach and drink as many piña coladas as I want. And I plan to do just that.

"Theñor? Theñor! I said no thalt, NOOO THALT, on my margarita..."

Gra-doo

At my old job, there was a coke machine where you could get a coke for a quarter. It was awesome. But for a while I thought I had figured out why the cokes were just a quarter -- the tops were always covered in probably-cancer-inducing black grah-doo. (That is my father's word for unidentified gross stuff. I have no idea if that is how it is spelled, or even if it's a real word. He also always used to say that our ice cream was "corroded," and for a long time I really thought corroded meant "covered in freezerburn.") Anyway, back to my story. I thought they were cheap because my company had cut a deal with coca-cola to sell the nasty ones for a quarter. But my new office has a coke machine that also spits out cokes covered in grah-doo. And these cokes are full-price! (They're also warm.) This forces me to ask myself -- did I only just recently start noticing the nastiness of cokes from a vending machine? Have they always been this way? How much of that crap have I consumed in my life? I know a lot of people who won't drink cokes straight from the can, but I just can't bring myself to do that. I like my coke as throat-numbingly carbonated as I can get it, and you just can't get that if you drink it from a straw or pour it into a cup. So instead I wipe off the top obsessively and tell myself that if I can't see it, it can't hurt me.

Well, yes, it is a slow day at the office... why do you ask?

One day you're in, and the next day you're out

I am in love with Project Runway. I can't get enough of it. I'm rooting for either Nick or Daniel V. at this point. Santino is an ass and will either be extremely famous and successful or will make no money. He has talent but he's too wrapped up in his own "vision" to be able to design for everyday people. So if he makes it, it would only be with a high-fashion couture line.

I am mostly in love with this show because of Tim Gunn, the director of the Parson's School who acts as the contestants' mentor and cheerleader. I really like his way of critiquing -- he's totally unafraid to tell someone that something looks like shit and needs a lot of help, but he's also quick to compliment and encourage. It makes you feel like he's being honest. In my design classes, I've really gotten sick of people who a) are afraid to tell someone that something is not working, or on the other end, b) are incapable of giving a compliment. There are more A's than B's in most of my classes, thankfully, but it still gets annoying. There are times when I know a piece I'm presenting is bad, and I don't want to hear someone rip it apart; on those days, I try to just get through my presentation as quickly as possible, although sometimes people actually have good advice. But when I know that my piece is strong but could still use some work, I'm happy to hear that people like it -- but I'm much more interested to hear their ideas for how I could make it better. I try to give that kind of advice when I critique other people's work. Sometimes it's hard to do that without sounding like an asshole, but I try. It's especially hard when you can tell that someone really didn't connect with an assignment; on those days, I try to find something that's working and talk about that, and help them find ways to make that better. People usually know when their stuff isn't good, so they don't want anyone to dwell on the parts that obviously suck. And I always find it encouraging when people tell me that something is working, when I think the whole thing should go in the trash.

I started Typography this semester and I'm really liking it so far. The beginning of a semester is always nice because it's like a fresh start. And I really needed one after last semester. Last semester was hard. My job was really stressful and it made it hard for me to come home and switch into homework mode. By the time I got over that, the semester was almost over and all of my stuff was crap. It was very depressing. But we just turned in our initial sketches for our first assignment in typography, and I felt like mine were really strong.

cell phone citations

Earlier this week someone at our company hired a temp. Not just any temp, mind you -- the Cell-Phone Wielding Temp from Hell. Matt told me that my assignment this week was to blog about her because my friends would enjoy it, and because I am a woefully inadequate blogger and I need to work on that. Well, actually he didn't say that last part, but it was implied. I just don't have anything to say, that's all. I don't know why I started a blog in the first place.

Ok, so the temp. This girl was so atrocious, I'm not even sure if I will be able to find the words to describe her; but I will make a valiant try. She seemed nice enough on the first day -- way over-dressed, quiet, college-aged. Normal. She sat in a cubicle diagonally across from mine.

Then around 11am, I noticed that she was talking, loudly, about her boss from the waitressing job she apparently keeps, and how he was not giving her shifts. And how he is a perv and he hits on 19-year-old hostesses. Eventually I realized she was talking on her cell phone. She went on and on about how she wasn't getting shifts and this was causing her to lose a lot of money (yes, she said "lose," rather than some form of "not make" -- evidence of this idiot's sense of entitlement), and she was going to "sue the shit out of him." I wished she would shut up, but I was also kind of enjoying listening to her and making judgements on her character. She said he wasn't giving her shifts because of her "scars," whatever those were, and she was going to sue him for discrimination. I wanted to lean over and suggest that he wasn't giving her shifts because she was obnoxious and believed the world owed her something, but I thought better of it.

So finally she hung up the phone. But then, not much later, she started talking again, this time to some friend who apparently had been on a date or was not going on a date or something equally inane. She was telling this friend that she needed to "find a man who can take you out and show you a good time." Sorry, she was not telling her friend that, she was yelling it into her phone. Like she needed to be heard over loud music. Then she called her friend some idiotic nickname that I can't remember. I don't know what else she said to this person because I had to leave the room or I would have said something nasty. By the time I came back from a purposeless stroll around the office, she was quiet again, and there were no more incidents that day.

Next day. By 9:30 she's back on the phone. Now she's asking a friend for legal advice about the accident she was in. I learned over the course of this 30-minute conversation that she was in Alabama and was hit by a drunk driver, and the police let him go. I suppose that is where the scars came from. I did not see a single scar on her in the fleeting glimpses I had of this girl. Maybe they are emotional. Who cares. I also learned that her brother is paralyzed. I don't know if it's related to the accident or not. Anyway, this sounds like a terrible story, but as my father would say, I wouldn't trust this girl as far as I could throw her, so I don't know how much of it is actually true. She also told us that she went to West Point, and that she is studying to be a biologist or a chemist. I do not believe either of those statements. And if they are true, I feel very sorry for her, because her disposition is such that she is destined to be perceived as a liar for the rest of her life. She also has one of those annoying sorority-girl I-do-lots-of-coke scratchy voices. Actually, there was a lot about this girl that gave me bad flashbacks to my days at Pi Phi.

She was asking legal advice because she wanted to sue the cops who let the drunk driver go. I'm not sure if you can sue the cops. Also, apparently someone is "fucking up [her] credit" by not returning her phone calls. Probably because she left them a message accusing them of fucking up her credit, in those exact words.

Later that day she called Sprint to yell at them because they "fucked up her cell phone plan" and it was causing her to go way over her minutes (go figure) and costing her "a shitload of money." "You fucked it up and you're going to fix it," she told them. And -- can you believe it? -- they hung up on her. Which, of course, did not make her any more complacent. So she called them back and yelled at them even more angrily, and they hung up on her again. She finally got someone to listen to her and they fixed the problem, but not before much cursing and spitting. Matt wondered that night why she paid the bill in the first place. But she's an idiot, so of course that wouldn't have occured to her.

Mind you, all of these conversations she's having are at a decibel level usually reserved for airplane tarmacs or rock concerts. Well, not really, but it was loud enough that I could hear her down the hallway.

The next call she made, she asked her friend if he had met with his P.O. (I assume it's a he, but I have no reason for doing so). Now, I have a friend from middle school who, for reasons no one ever quite understood, desperately wanted to be a parole officer when she grew up. She would talk about it all the time. When we finally got our licenses, she would make us all drive by the jail whenever we went out, just so she could look at it. I've lost touch with her unfortunately, so I have no idea if she followed through with this dream. I always kind of admired her for it, because she knew what she wanted and she was completely unafraid to tell people even if they thought she was weird. I don't think it ever even occured to her that it was weird. I also, every now and then, hear her in my head saying, "doyouTHINK they'llBOMB theCASTLE?" Oh, Taylor.

Anyway, the point of that story was to explain why I know exactly what a P.O. is. Apparently her friend had missed the meeting with his P.O. He also had neglected to ask his P.O. if he could leave the state so they could go on a trip together. I don't know if this was a boyfriend. I hope it was.

I can't even remember what else I heard her say on that cell phone, but I think I have good friends that I know less about. The entire office was astonished at her behavior, but of course we're all corporate wimps so no one said anything to her. Safe to say, though, that she will not be coming back.

Of course, only today did I find this. They actually print pads of these. My friend J says he wants to get one for his 1.5 hour train ride everyday.

Oh, the best part -- as she was leaving on her last day, I heard her tell the girl who hired her, "Man, that was pretty boring stuff. I feel stupider after having done it."

And I have no problem believing that she did not mean that as a joke.