I am so, so, so in love with Neil Sedaka. I only just recently realized that so many of my favorite songs that I listened to growing up (KBSG, baby — I have major oldies roots in my musical tastes) were actually by him. You know, “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do”, and “Sweet 16″, and “Calendar Girl”, and “Take Good Care of My Baby”, and “Who Put the Bop…” etc. Plus, he seems to have been quite the heartthrob…

This is sort of related to, but in no way conquering, my undying love for Billy Joel.

In current events, my room is a mess, and half of it is packed up. Also, I painted my window-frame (outside), and it’s looking pretty foxy.

I finished “The Things They Carried”, but still have not finished “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, and that’s kind of important, because I will not be able to take it to school with me, since it’s Mom’s book. So I’m thinking maybe I just won’t sleep tonight, and read instead. After I’m done packing and cleaning, that is.

Going now to eat something… sorry for my scatterbrainedness, this has been the weirdest week. Strange conversations with even stranger people; getting too much sleep and then not anywhere near enough; thinking I was broke and then having hundreds of dollars; and, oh yeah, saying good-bye to all my friends and packing up all my most important earthly posessions.

Barista Goddess says: “I-uh-what the crap? BRIAN! Unless your name is short for Brianfhqwhgads… then I’m already in a committed relationship.”

I’m leaving for Whitman very, very early Friday morning. Currently, life is pretty good; I have almost everything that I need for school, and those things which I don’t have, I still actually do have enough money to buy, and have a few hundred left over for books. Hurrah, I have made it! I have reached the end of summer with more than a nickel in my pocket, and I’m ready for college!

That said, I’m bummed about a few things. One is, Sunday when I went to church, I realized it was the last time I’d be going to All Saints for awhile, and I got a little mopey, especially when I acolyted, and both Father Steve and Mother Cynthia got all sniffly at me. During communion, right after she gave me the bread, Mother Cynthia also said a little going-away prayer for me, which was very sweet and very much appreciated. Meanwhile, I haven’t seen her son for a few weeks… *pointed cough*

Today was a good day at work. I sat and read “The Things They Carried”, which is required reading for Whitman, and it definitely got better after the first hundred pages, which is good, because it only had a hundred and forty left after that in which to stay good. It fulfilled this; the pretentiousness went down, and the rhetoric went up. (Hurrah for rhetoric!) Also, I found a small drip coffee maker — which I REALLY wanted for my dorm room at school — which, along with some paper filters of the proper size, was really only about $16. This made me extremely happy, indeed.

I haven’t been able to get through to Lauren yet *mumble, groan* and miss her dearly… *blows a kiss to a cnytr* I’m praying she’s doing well at college.

My room is an utter mess, and I realize now that I have to pack pretty much everything that is currently lying all over my floor, and I’m really not quite sure how I’m going to do that. I feel like maybe I’m taking too much stuff, and I feel really bad about that, not for any rational reason of my own, but mostly actually because since David has to fly back to school, he can’t take as much stuff, and so that makes me feel spoiled by comparison. Moop.

I saw a *disgusting* movie about Eddie Gein last night — the title of the movie was “Ed Gein” — and I am going to say that, if you have fear of blood, nudity, cannibalism, guns, fire, violence, or creepy, mumbly, middle-aged men who see their dead mothers telling them that Jesus wants them to kill people — well, then, you shouldn’t see the movie. It was really unbelievably gross, even more graphic than I would have expected on cable TV, and, um, ew. I also watched a couple Lifetime movies (I can’t believe I watched Lifetime), one of which involved a girl killing a cheerleader at her school (BASED ON A TRUE STORY!! *GASP* *SHOCK*), and the other of which involved a student sexually assaulting his teacher (BASED ON A TRUE STORY!! *GASP* *SHOCK*). Both of them were basically very badly acted, but Lifetime’s like a train wreck, and I just couldn’t bring myself to stop watching. I wanted to know WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

The reason I was watching Lifetime was because I was all alone at home yesterday, which was frankly pretty nice. I’ve been having a fair amount of pressure from customers (a guy complained to Megan about me the other day! I couldn’t believe it — neither could she. He said I gave him “attitude”. WHAT?!?! She called him the “Chai Spin Nazi”), and then also I think my nerves have been a little frayed by the pressures of trying to figure out what-all I need to take to school, who can I see before I leave, etc etc. Anyway, it was a good time —

Though that brings me to another story, and frankly, this one’s a little upsetting. The middle-aged guy was creepy; okay. What happened Saturday was just gross. I went to clean the bathroom at the end of the day for closing, and, horror of horrors, there was POOP ON THE FLOOR. Now, I can see where guys can have a little trouble aiming, especially little kids, and I’ve cleaned that up before. But human feces on my bathroom floor at the store?! NOT ACCEPTABLE. Nobody came up to me and said, “Whoops, I pooped on the floor.” But that’s not all. Someone — perhaps the same person, perhaps someone else — had managed to step in the poop, smearing it in various places all over the floor. Now, why didn’t THAT person at least say, “Hey, you’ve got poop on the floor.”? Well, so I had to clean up someone else’s feces, and I was not happy about. I just can’t figure how you miss the toilet when you’re taking a —

And frankly, I’m happy to be leaving Tully’s now.

So that’s my glamour-ridden life. Barista Goddess is about to hang up her apron and go greet the great wide world. Though I must admit, the coffee addiction will not go away. Nor is there any need for it to do so, now that I have a beautiful $16 Capresso CoffeeBreak(TM) 4-cup coffeemaker!!

Here’s the blog I meant to post Thursday:

A creepy story…

Close to closing tonight, this guy that I’d never seen before came into my store, and asked for… I dunno what, maybe a latte. So I started preparing his drink, and he goes, “You look tired, Sarah.” Well, okay, so he read my name-tag. Most people don’t bother. I said something like, “Yeah, I was up till five A.M. last night…” (the truth) And he said, “That’s no good, my dear!” I was like… “my dear”? What the heck? So I said, “Well, I just couldn’t sleep… I was watching TV.” And he goes (are you ready?) “Aw, that’s no good… there are much more fun things to do than watch TV when you can’t sleep.” I wanted to hit him so much, but there was big counter between us, and besides, Tully’s customer policy discourages that sort of thing. My skin crawled a little… this guy wasn’t my age, he was balding-style middle-aged. And he was even reasonably charming, but only in a creepy way. Anyway, it was creepy. CREEPY.

More recently; that is, yesterday and today. I got a new computer for school! A sweetie patootie iBook and an iPod to go with. Now, everyone already KNOWS how cool the iBooks are, so I won’t go on about it. But if you don’t know what an iPod is, let me explain:

If you like music, buy one. You can download your entire iTunes library onto one of these babies. I firewired over 5 GB of music onto my baby in under a half-hour. If you don’t speak computerese, let me simplify this: that’s 1429 songs, one or two of which are a half-hour long. That’s a heck of a lot of fine, fine music.

So now I have another work story, from today:

We have these Odwalla juices that we sell… they come in plastic bottles, and most of them are normal, but there is this one that we sell called “Superfood” which looks like liquified spinach… it is really nasty. Anyway, we keep these juices in a refridgerated glass case, right next to our pastry case, which is itself right next to our cash register. For some reason beyond my knowing, the refridgerated case stopped refridgerating today. All of its humming had no affect on the temperature inside the case. This is mildly upsetting, but the juices are pasteurized, and would probably be fine. Except that the case was closed, and while the coldness wasn’t working, the light was working just fine. The hot light.

Important point of science here: when a substance gets hot, the atoms in the substance start moving more rapidly, and this causes the substance to expand.

I was working all alone this afternoon — luckily there were also no customers in the store at this time, either — when I heard this really loud POP. I thought my shake, which I’d set on top of the case, had fallen of it or something. But no. This lovely “Superfood” bottle had exploded, all over the inside of the refridgerated case. It splattered superfoody nastiness on the soda pop bottles, the cookies, and, of course, the inside of the whole case. It took me near an hour to fully clean up (I kept thinking, inappropriately and grossly, of the scene in “Pulp Fiction” where John Travolta shoots Marvin in the face, and then he and Samuel L. Jackson have to clean all of his brains out of the back of the car…), and I had to leave the door of the case open the rest of the day, because I was afraid something else would explode. I’m just glad that that Superfood crap doesn’t come in a glass bottle…