Trekkychick

Dear Readers,

I have for the past several years attended a Catholic young adult group, not only for the plentiful happy hours, nor exclusively for the fabulous parties hosted by Mike and his Keg, but for the genuine friendships that have developed and the pleasure I derive from enjoying fellowship with these friends (often, I enjoy them at our weekly happy hours, or at Mike and his Keg’s fabulous parties, but I assure you that is purely coincidental). The single members are dwindling in numbers as we are gradually overtaken by those members who meet, pair off, and take their vows at such an accelerated pace that I’m often clueless as to their pairing until I inquire as to their absense at happy hour and am informed that they are on their honeymoon.

It is with such swift and efficient grace that these Catholic mergers materialize that I often suspect the fleeting daliance they call dating is really just a requisite pre-merger period to allow the future bride sufficient time to rank her female friendships into a hierarchy from person-who-hands-out-the-program-at-the-ceremony at the top (that’s me, AWESOME!) to maid-of-honor at the bottom (loser).

This marriage pandemic has become so severe among Catholics that a break-up, also known as the complete rejection of the Catholic pre-merger phase, shakes the group to its core.

I witnessed this several weeks back as two members failed to transition from their pre-merger phrase of dating into its properly finalized form of unconditionally-unending union. The Catholic male in question was met no less than fourteen times at a party with the following inquiry:

Catholic partygoer: Where’s [Catholic female]?
Catholic male: We broke up.

The collective horrified reaction of “What happened??” led me to suspect there are probably only two justifications that would have been deemed acceptable in response, and these would have involved untimely death and/or deportation.

Or that she wasn’t Catholic.

Of course in stark contrast there is me, who has become so phenomenally successful at the art of breaking up that if I go three weeks without one I become concerned that I’m losing my edge. My pre-merger phase of dating tends to stagnate and then reverse into the classic pre- pre-merger phase of friendship, and sometimes the break-up is so successful that we are catapulted back into the pre- pre- PRE- merger phase of “Do I know you?”

I would like to think there’s a happy medium to be found somewhere between dating for three weeks and getting married, and dating for three weeks and breaking-up. Two good friends of mine dated “through every season” to experience each other for a full year before taking the nuptial plunge, and after three years of marriage continue to experience and demonstrate mutual devotion at its finest. If I were to one day experience unbridled devotion to another human being who could both receive and return it, I would hope to emulate theirs.

In the meantime I remain your proud singles sponsor.

–Troi out

Dear Readers,

Have you been feeling pooped out? You’re not the only one. Turns out your cup of coffee might be pooped out too. Literally.

The cuddly weasel-like creature you see here, known to most as the Asian palm civet and known to me as the Pooping-Coffee Cat, has a particular affinity for coffee berries. The Pooping-Coffee Cat feeds on only the ripest and tastiest coffee berries and poops out the beans undigested. As the coffee berries are partially digested, the inner bean mixes with the Pooping-Coffee Cat’s digestive enzymes, resulting in a bean that is revered for its superior taste and lack of bitterness. Once the bean is extracted from the Pooping-Coffee Cat’s feces, that is.

The Pooping-Coffee Cats make their living mainly on the islands of Sumatra, Java, Bali, the Phillipines, and in East Timor. Their defecated coffee is sold primarily in Japan and the United States and a cafe in Australia sells the delicacy for an affordable price of only $33.00 US dollars per cup. (And to think I looked everywhere but Australia for a cup of coffee with a price tag that exceeded a tank of gas.)

Consumers have questioned whether the pooped out coffee is sanitary, but the Pooping-Coffee Cats’ publicists assure me that there is no public record of illness resulting from drinking this fabulous fecal beverage. Although, what self-respecting person would actually come forward and confess to having contracted illness by these means? What would they say to their doctor? “…I’m wondering if my stomach ache is at all related to that $33 cup of coffee I drank this morning that came from beans cultivated in the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet and then evacuated in its subsequent bowel movements…?”

What I’d like to know is who makes their living sorting through the civet’s feces and gathering the cherished beans. I realize in this economy we can’t be too picky about our employment options, but I know that when I have my intake at the Temp Agency, in my list of skills and experience the last box I’m going to mark is the one that says “Ability to sort through the bowels of homely animals of Asian origin.” I can only imagine my work day: “Hey Fred, I think I found one over here in this pile of fecal matter! Yep, it’s a coffee bean…wait….no….damn, it’s just another acorn. Let’s keep looking….”

Learning about the Asian palm civet and its generous contribution to the world of quality coffee reminds me of the age-old saying:

A cup of coffee in the hand is worth two Asian palm civet’s bowel movements in the bush.

–Troi out

Dear Readers,

The other day as I worked in a kindergarten classroom I overheard the classroom teacher reading a book to the students. The book was a fairly generic children’s book teaching standard kindergarten vocabulary words such as muffler, jumper, and galoshes……wait, what??

These may have been standard kindergarten vocabulary words in the early 1900s when the teacher bought this book, but to my twenty-first century knowledge a muffler is a car part, a jumper is one who jumps, and galoshes have been extinct since our last President outlawed three-syllable words because he couldn’t pronounce them and his advisors suggested a simplified one-syllable term to replace it. And so it came to pass that in present-day Portland, we use words like scarf, dress, and boots. Thereby saving a total of four syllables, increasing the efficiency of a given conversational exchange as follows:

Yesterday: “You look dashing in your new matching jumper and muffler. Now run along and fetch your galoshes so you don’t catch cold in that tempestuous snowstorm.”

Today, after reading Troi’s revolutionary blog: “Put on your dress and scarf and boots and let’s get outta here.”

I move that we simplify the length and complexity of all of our words, thereby increasing the units of information that can be exchanged over a finite period of time. Imagine just how much information I could share in one of my lengthy (yet highly enjoyable!) voice mail messages if I weren’t constrained by multisyllabic words.

Think about it.

–Troi out

Dear Readers,

So here I am, wisely using my time at a recent work meeting to catch up on in-depth personal conversation with coworkers*, when the topic of facebook arose and a coworker divulged indignantly that a facebook friend had recently blocked her from posting comments on his wall. (For those of you readers unfamiliar with the concept of facebook, that is, people who are dead, almost dead, or who were born yesterday—-literally—-this is not a real wall and posting on it does not therefore constitute graffiti.) My coworker admitted mild surprise at being the recipient of this virtual barricade, considering she’d never written on his wall to begin with and that their relationship was completely cordial.

Which got me to wondering why somebody would have a facebook friend from whom they had no interest in hearing, even in the form of an innocuous wall greeting. I understand that not all of my facebook friends are those best friends for whom I would jump in front of an ice cream truck (not to save them, but to buy some ice cream) or with whom I hope to be buried (but not while alive). Yet doesn’t that facebook friend status imply some level of amicable, or at least merely tolerable, connection? If the thought of you writing a comment on my wall invokes a feeling of fear, panic, disgust, or sheer horror, and I have to go out of my way to block any possible contact you might hypothetically one day try to make, shouldn’t I perhaps not add you as a facebook friend to begin with??

But then it occurred to me that denying a friend request comes with its own set of complications. After all, everybody who’s anybody adds anybody and everybody. And just when you’ve clicked “ignore friend request” and begin to think you’re safe, you end up running into your friend’s brother’s wife’s dog’s nephew’s younger sister who you didn’t add because you’ve never met her and weren’t sure she actually existed, but here she is at Fred Meyer in the cereal aisle wondering why you ignored her friend request because she’s a very nice person really and what has she ever done to you??

And suddenly the lightbulb came on, and right after that I had a really good idea. Rather than adding facebook “friends,” we need to begin organizing our social connections and compartmentalizing them into two columns of contacts: Facebook “friends” and Facebook “foes.” People with whom we have some level of regular contact, and whom we like, love, or tolerate, will henceforth be esteemed as such in the “friends” column.

Facebook “foes,” on the other hand, are people whom you’ve never met (or you went to preschool with them, or they went to preschool with your friend’s brother’s wife’s dog’s nephew’s younger sister, or you were baptized in the same religious ceremony at the age of seven months), or people whom you dislike, cannot tolerate, and/or entirely despise. These people will be recognized as such in your “foes” column. Rather than a bright and shining profile pic, their profile box will be marred by a giant red X, and when all of your friends go to your page, they will instantly know who the cool people are, and who the rejects are. It will be just like junior high, except that in junior high I didn’t have the internet and couldn’t mark a big red X on people’s faces just because I didn’t like them. Not after that one time, when I got suspended from school for a week.**

Readers, I hope that you like my brainchild of differentiating facebook “friends” from facebook “foes” and perpetuating alienation and divisiveness among our online social connections. Please stay tuned for my next post: How to lose friends and alienate people at a rapid rate through blogging.

–Troi out

*If you are my supervisor, that sentence is entirely false.

**Just kidding. I like everybody. Except you.

I am dedicating this blog post to my friend John, who was unsuccessful in his recent attempt to obtain a chocolate malt shake at a fast food restaurant that shall remain unnamed, while taking his wife out for milkshakes. My friend John cannot be faulted for his lack of success, but rather it might be posited that the blame should fall on the employee who did not hear John’s seven explicit assertions of: “No, I said a CHOCOLATE MALTED SHAKE.”

Following my hysterical laughter upon hearing of John’s unfortunate experience, I found myself reflecting on incompetence in the food service industry, and I have come to the conclusion there are two kinds of incompetence: accidental incompetence, and willful incompetence.

The former, that of accidental incompetence, can best be exemplified by using the example of a novice Starbucks employee, who shall remain anonymous. (Okay, fine, it was me.) There is a minute possibility that I may have appeared incompetent my first few weeks on the job, due to a few minor faux pas. There was the time I re-used the pitcher that had previously been filled with coffee to fill it with black tea, without first rinsing said pitcher. Now, I didn’t see the problem considering I love the taste of coffee and assumed the coffee remnants left in the pitcher could only enhance the taste of the black tea; however, my supervisor thought otherwise. There was the time that I couldn’t scoop a pastry off the shelf and it crumbled on the floor; as did the second, third, and fourth pastries, until I was physically removed from the pastry premises. There were the failed attempts to add the espresso into my customer’s lattes, the successful act of spilling scalding coffee all over myself, the placing of all large bills from my cash transactions into somebody else’s cash box instead of my own; you know, the usual tiny mistakes.

Then there is willful incompetence. This is the employee who hears “Chocolate malted shake, NOT malted CRUNCH” and proceeds to pour cookie crunches into the shake while riddled with maniacal laughter. (John, the previous statement may have been embellished.) This willful incompetence could also be my coworker from Starbucks a few summers ago who, after serving a “half decaf venti sugar-free hazelnut no-foam 175 degree latte” to a customer, turned to me and whispered delightfully, “She got ALL DECAF because she was a B#$&@!!” Upon taking this customer’s order, I hadn’t been cognizant of the fact that she was a b#$%@, likely because I was so all-consumed by attempting to correctly punch in her order on the various screens on the register and was unable to look up and see the gesture that she was giving me. (I won’t tell you which fingers were used during this gesture, but I will tell you that it was not the thumbs-up.) At any rate, while I found my coworker’s actions amusing, I have to say that no matter how unpleasant a customer, if that customer is spending upwards of five bucks on a beverage, he or she should probably receive the beverage of request.

And John, you should have received your chocolate malted shake. But I’m glad you didn’t, because I’m sure I was not the only person whose day was brightened by your traumatic tale of malted misfortune.

–Troi out