Doodler in Distress

     There is always more going on under the surface than meets the eye. It has been a particularly emotional, stressful, irritating week or two. Things that are bothersome have become a blur, and the points that were particularly happy and good really stand out like: my bedtime duets with Matt, Charley cracking up as I did head stands for her on the front lawn, doodling on the dry erase board, unwinding on my walks, volleyball, bowling, lunch at Pho 999, dinner at Stonefire, watching a French film with Matt, and oh yeah, the Kings winning the Stanley Cup. Things to change for the next week- because it's bound to have its up and downs too: less drinking (or removing alcohol from the picture altogether), drinking more water, less phone, more Matt time, and less strong language.
     Fortunately, if next week goes horribly wrong I will have more than a week of camping and good times to look forward to (at Hunington Lake, Sequoia, and hopefully Ashland, Oregon) and to undo the stress. Ultimately, my bad week is not all healed... I am holding on to the things that made me angry, and I don't think my Healing with the Fairies cards or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are going to help me resolve them (... or will they? I dash to find the cards and turn on my music player, and it is in fact helping).

     Maybe sometimes the key to releasing yourself from whatever has tied your heart up into an emotional knot is to do what you love and truly be in the moment when you are doing it... you may have noticed via facebook how much attention the dry erase board has received from me recently.

    Maybe a camping trip is just what the doctor ordered, and that in the wilderness among all of the beautiful trees, in the quiet fresh air that can only be found when away from the city, in the realm of the fairies :), I will be able to let go of all of the little things... if that doesn't work I don't know what will. 

Thanks a latte

     Sometimes I start writing and after a few dedicated minutes I read over what I've got and.. hate it. I begin to tear it apart (the inner critic's a *itch) The one thing I hate the most in my writing is my whining. My life is not nearly as bad as I make it sound or genuinely think it is at times. For one thing, I have no debt. Another, I am happily married. Another, my family is awesome. Another, I am not allergic to anything-that I know of. I could go on... I think.. wait let me think of one more for good measure. I whine a lot about my job, but as miserable as my job makes me at times, I feel hella important there. Alright, so don't feel sorry for me when I go on and on about what I want to do when I grow up, and how I'm not on the right path, or how lost I am in my labyrinth.

     My work is to serve a huge variety of people a not so huge variety of drinks. I can pour coffee with ease, steam foam with the best, and if you have a question about what to order (this surprises me sometimes) I can actually aid you in choosing- often, with very little to go off of beyond the typical "I want something that has caffeine but doesn't taste like dirt", and I can do all this with a smile. This is the part of the job that is seen by the customers, and according to our comment box- customer's like me. That feels good.
     To my co-workers, I am someone they can depend on when there is a line out the door, when they need help getting their shift covered, and when a strange coffee situation arises they can count on me to, at very least, masterfully improvise. Oh yeah and behind the scenes, I can do really good (or bad but still funny) impressions of our customers like: the guy that just realized he has an hour to finish a paper and truly believes that I can serve him a solution in a 12, 16, or 20 oz. cup, or the guy who has literally asked out every girl that works at my store.. in writing... usually on a napkin.. sometimes a pastry bag, or, the more common customer, that cannot get off of their phone to order, doesn't know the difference between a cappuccino and frappucino (btw BIG difference), just ordered the most UNhealthy thing on the menu to then ask how many calories are in it, or the low talkers that look really annoyed when you ask them to repeat their order yet still will not adjust their volume in any amount when they reiterate. Sorry for bashing. Honestly, for every crappy customer there are usually 2 awesome customers that "see" me (like they way the blue people in Avatar see each other), and about 10 that have no impact on my mood because all they want is their coffee and to get to class on time. (These statistics are complete b.s. but you get it.)
     To my big boss/es, I am a happy, little, blonde girl with excellent customer service skills who does the coffee, pastry, and milk orders well (or well enough), creates schedules and gets shifts covered, who doesn't call to complain about little things, and smiles all damn day long (despite above mentioned customer types).
That's three roles: barista, co-worker, and manager. I am three people every day at this job, and in each position I am in good standing. So what the heck do I really have to complain about.


Awkward story #1  Light or Dark?
My best friend got me a job at Starbucks. She had already been a barista for over a year  (by then you know the coffee world like the back of your hand), and I was working register. Someone asked "which has more caffeine? Light or dark roast coffee?" and I answered "dark." So the customer then chose the dark roast. My friend comes over from the bar to correct me,"Uh, actually the light roast has more caffeine." I think the customer and I said "Oh" in unison. I had already poured the darn cup, and now the customer wants light. Oy vey!- I just want to clear this up. Technically, if you are comparing bean to bean, yes, the light has more caffeine, but the difference in the amount of caffeine is so tiny that I would be surprised if you could even tell (There is more to it than that, but it's something you can google search when you are bored). I re-poured them the light with a smile.

Awkward story #2   Oh, Madison!
My first day at a new coffee shop, despite my past coffee shop work experience, I was nervous-like crazy-shaky-hands-even-though-I-haven't-had-any-coffee-yet nervous- and rusty. It had been almost a year between my Sbux job and this one. So when you are nervous and rusty, they cannot put you on bar or register without worrying about you, so they make you clean. I was asked to clean the counters, and I wanted to do a really good job because I couldn't do a good job on anything else yet.
After I have cleaned the coffee counters to their pristine glory, I decide to clean under the machines. I lift our espresso grinder and before I know what has happened, the floor is covered in espresso beans. Apparently you cannot lift our espresso grinder when their is espresso in it. I was so embarrassed, and at Sbux when you messed up, especially as a newbie, they made you feel awful about it. I waited for someone to sigh in anger or bark at me  to clean it up. Instead I got a laugh- this persons laugh is awesome btw- while my co-worker/ trainer grabbed the broom and started cleaning up. She even went as far as to relate that she had done this before. I must have looked scared and pathetic, because she kept telling me it was okay, not a big deal, that it happens, and cooing me back to reality.


Awkward story # 3  Gaston le Chat

This is not the original, but its
a very close recreation done
by the marvelous Claire Moles.

We have this white board at work, and it's supposed to be for important work related notes but it's a coffee shop so... not too many super important work related notes are left on it. It has become a doodle board more or less. (Or crazy list board-celebrity crushes, annoying customer comments/questions, and what not). Often one person will start drawing, another will add something, and then another, and another. One of our drawings started with a really fat cat, and as the night went on he became a really fat French cat named Gaston who had enough of these annoying customers. He had funny word bubbles, a few expletives were thrown in, and he was even smoking a cig and waving the bird... anyway, when you close it is your job to erase the board. After all we don't want our manager to see the sort of thing that goes on our important work related note board unless it's an important work related note.
It didn't get erased.. Thank goodness the boss found it funny. She didn't even erase him.
She did erase the expletives and the middle finger though.


     I love being a barista- for the most part.
     I love the people I work with. We are allies. We can get through the day together. We can share a laugh. We can double bar. We can make polo shirts and aprons look cool (no? oh well).
     I love the people I serve. They need coffee as badly as I do. They smile. They joke when I blotch the coffee script (ex. asking if someone wants room for cream in their frappuccino). They say they missed me when I was in Oregon and that they're happy I am back.
     I like (love's a strong word) my bosses. After a truly hard day or week, they assure me I have done well. They congratulate me when I exceed expectations. They have freed me from wearing the polo shirt of lameness (free dress = yay yay yay!- dorky dance included). They appear more and more human. They even curse and swear when their day is rough or they've blotched something (that's right, they blotch things too)

     I still do not want this to be my career, but I am definitely fine with it for now. After all, I still want to learn how to do a rosetta on a latte.

Marilyn and Me

     I do not remember with perfect clarity when my obsession with Marilyn Monroe came about. I was probably 7 or 8 and had decided that I wanted to be like her, because she was so pretty and likable. I hadn't even seen her in a movie when I had decided that. I remember my mom telling me that the mole on my chin was a beauty mark and someone saying that Marilyn Monroe had a beauty mark too, which made me feel special- actually more than special. It made me feel beautiful. 

My Marilyn themed
dress and hair... and yes,
that's Matt. We have been
together that long.

     I have to take a moment to reflect on that. Yes, I remember feeling beautiful, before puberty struck. Then came acne, and hips, and boobs, and a bunch of crap magazines with pictures of celebrities with waists as big my wrist, and... well I kind of didn't feel so beautiful anymore. That lasted a while (most of high school actually, which of course felt like forever), and the sugary caffeine-loaded frappucinos from Starbucks paired with lots of fast food was a big step in the wrong direction.
     During that period of my life that I sometimes think of as my dark ages (especially when my dad loads the most awful pictures from those years onto our digital picture frame for friends and family to see), I had a growing collection of Marilyn memorabilia that included posters, two shirts, and a clock. I kind of started to idolize her. Or at least the image of her. In my senior year, I even bought a dress and styled my hair to look as Marilyn as possible for prom. 

     I may have had a collection and all, but I didn't really know much about the woman. I mean I knew that her real name was Norma Jeane, she was an actress and a sex symbol, sang happy birthday to JFK in a sultry voice, that diamonds were her best friend, and that she died young from some sort of drug over dose. I could say that I know more about her now because I've read Wikipedia entries about her, did my fair share of Googling, read magazine articles, and watched a number of her movies- as well as My Week with Marilyn.Yet I still feel like I don't know who she was. There's a lot about her laid out clean and clear, but beyond her stardom, her image as a sex symbol, her way with the camera (clothed or not), she remains a mystery. Marilyn Monroe was really a pseudo identity. Norma Jeane was sort of... lost to Hollywood. So I wonder what it would have been like to be that girl.
     Almost fifty years after her death as I was placing my groceries on the check stand, her face on the cover of Vanity Fair held my attention with a force as could not be ignored. I made the purchase (with zero buyer's remorse- can't say that when I buy In Touch, Star, or People ) and instantly flipped to the pictures... I mean article.
After I finished reading, I realized she was human and vulnerable yet still beautiful. Always beautiful. The obsession I had in childhood has sort of evolved. There's something about her looks, her smile, her energy that is captivating. But it's that realness that I like so much about her now. (That and she makes femininity seem like a super power.) It's probably not right to idolize anyone, but I definitely think that both Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jeane are worth remembering.

"I didn't pay much attention to the whistles and whoops, in fact, I didn't quite hear them. I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody; the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged; she belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world."-Marilyn Monroe

I spent Saturday night with Matt at the Getty. We Missed the Kings game for some romance, and hey, they still won. We have been married just over six months now, which Brings our total relationship time close to 8 years (no small feat for a 23 and 25 year old). And somehow, marriage has made a world of difference. First, it feels like something has been accomplished (there's a big sigh of relief), then it feels like I am looking back on a dream when I think about my wedding and honeymoon, and then the start up, which was perhaps not so dream like (We moved to Oregon for 3 months but our job search had no avail. Then we came back to California searching for work, back in with my parents -don't worry we still love each other.. and my parents, back to work, and now looking for apartments-some great and some not so great- on the weekends.)

It is strange, though, to go from seeing each other all day every day to seeing each other a couple of hours with only the weekends to fully spend together. Maybe that's what being grown up is all about. That seems unfair though. It would be more accurate to say that is what working full time is all about.

Anyway getting back to the Getty (which is no longer free after 5 pm on Saturdays), Matt and I succeeded in having some peaceful, romantic, wonderful alone time at one of my favorite places in Los Angeles. I did the unthinkable by asking if we could leave the tv screen during NHL playoffs, especially when our team was playing, and Matt did the most beautiful thing a husband could do. He turned it off and took me out.

Don't settle. Seek!

 It has been almost a month since my last post.. and it has been crazy. I recently was hired back to my old work place as a supervisor. It's a step up (but kind of to the side if you know what I mean). Since my goal in life is not to be a coffee shop store manager or to completely ignore my degree, I have been wondering if going back to this job is a good idea.

     I find my new position to be a big time stress factor in my life. I know that I am fully capable of managing a coffee shop but this is not really moving me forward in any way. I absolutely hate being the person to cut people's hours, and ordering coffee and keeping track of inventory is not exactly a fulfilling task. It is what it is. It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that it is the type of job that you should not have to take home with you (... wish there was an off switch so that when I have to be in at work at 6am on Friday, I am not tossing and turning on Thursday night about getting my pastry order in by one the next day) and ever more obvious that I cannot help but bring it home. Matt has told me repeatedly that I need to stop letting everything get to me and that I am bothered too easily by my work life. I wonder when it will click and I will feel free after I clock out. In the meantime, I enjoy the weekends off although they pass too quickly for my long reading list. 

     Which brings me to what I am currently reading. The Hunger Games (forgive me for picking it up so late). The night before the Hunger Games start Peeta says "I don't want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I'm not...... I keep wishing I could think of a way to.. to show the Capitol they don't own me."  Suddenly I am trying not to laugh aloud while I am reading this. This is all that I want out of a job, out of life. I want to be me. Not some phony who tells people "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean" or sends people home early when I can see in their eyes they really need the hours right now. My fear is the same as Peeta's only I am not a contestant in a death match.  I know that is possible to be good at something even if you are not passionate about it, but if your heart is not in it (even though your performance reads as excellent) then you are still settling for mediocrity. 

     I think ultimately that my coming back has really lit a fire under my bum to start seeking rather than just accepting whatever opportunities fall into my lap.  I think it is high time that I follow through with my passions. The quote "You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take" keeps flashing in my mind (and flashes all the brighter while I am watching the LA Kings in the playoffs). I will always love coffee, but I know that I prefer to be on the customer side of the counter. Once you have a realization or dream of what you want to be or how you want to live your life, you will be miserable if you settle for something rather than work to pursue that goal. 

Attitude Adjustment

      Today began with me waking up later than I had intended. The night before I thought I am going to get up early, walk to Starbucks, and write. So I already messed up with the getting up early, but why is an early start so important anyway? I decided I could still go walk to Starbucks and sit down and write. Then the phone rings, and my sister says that she is pretty much at the house with my nieces. Of course, my nieces are adorable, and by now I feel like I really can't leave anymore. So I sit around looking for a movie for Mia, holding Charley (who has learned the slobbery art of blowing raspberries btw) while I wonder what my own kids will be like someday, and how I will ever go for walks or write when they come into my life.
      I do not want to say that my day is going badly. It is more fitting to say that my day is not going as I planned or hoped. That is kind of life's way, right? What I had been certain of last night was that I should do a physical activity followed by some writing. The day has flown by with a phone call, a fruitless search on Netflix, laundry load number one, a peanut butter English muffin, lots of attempts to keep a five year old and six month old entertained, laundry load number two, and my third cup of coffee. I hate when I get all whiny about not doing anything productive with my day (mainly because then I start worrying about the bigger picture).
      So physical activity, well let me count holding a baby while searching Netflix my physical activity. Writing is well... I am blogging, aren't I? So maybe it is not the exact intentions that I had last night, but it is ticking the boxes on a bunch of technicalities. What I hate more than me getting whiny about my unproductive day is me being whiny about my day and taking it out on the people I love. While I did not write a story or have an intense workout, I did get to spend time with my favorite ladies. If the key to life is balancing mind, body, and soul, then I need to work on keeping my attitude in check (and this is, as most things said on blogs are, easier said than done).

     Perhaps today did not go as planned, but yesterday and the day before I did something worth while and productive in my opinion. I had remembered from a high school art project carving a stamp out of linoleum, so I bought some carving block and linoleum cutters and got to it. I've made four stamps so far and am going to need more carving block soon, because I am addicted. The idea is to use my stamps to decorate wrapping paper, cards, and the like. It also happens to be pretty fun stuff.

 This sort of thing is what I love to do. I have not had so much fun with a DIY project since planning the decorations for my wedding, and I wish that I had thought of it then. I would have thought of some way to have used them.

       I have another craft idea that I hope I will get the chance to do sometime this week, and if I do I will of course post some more pictures.
     

      Overall, I have learned that the selection for the instantly streamed Netflix is lousy, that searching for a movie with a baby in your arms is difficult but not impossible, and that things may not go exactly as planned but there is no use in whining about it (instead I choose to blog about it ;> ). I am going to watch a movie with Matt tonight, and maybe I will get to go on my walk tomorrow.  

     

Body Mind and Spirit

     Before my amazing honeymoon in Ireland, I was rather obsessed with Celtic symbols and knots. One or two stand out in my mind. I am particularly fascinated with the trinity symbols, which have been said to mean various things (Father-Son-Holy Ghost, father-mother-child, maiden-mother-crone, past-present-future, birth-death-rebirth, etc.) but my favorite is body-mind-spirit. I believe that we need to find a balance between the three to live life to its fullest potential. Currently I feel physically, mentally, and (dare I say) spiritually healthy, but not to the extent that I have all of my kinks worked out.
     I feel physically strong, and I do not like going a whole day without a little physical activity. What about diet? I think I eat the right foods. I definitely should be drinking more water. Overall, I think I get an A in body, and I am not saying that I look like a supermodel rather that I pay attention to the way my body feels and don't push it overboard.
     What about mind? Well, I happen to be fond of my mind despite all of its quirks. I read frequently and think a lot. I communicate with my husband and whoever else can stand to listen. However, I do not make myself sit down and write like I know I should. Sometimes I think I need to work out, or look for jobs, or think of what to make for dinner, or.... a million other things that are all dying to be a top priority in my brain (and unfortunately, I allow little things to make it to the top on occasion). I am honest with myself and though this may not sound like a challenge it has been for me in the past, especially in those juicy teenage years (I have some awful and hilarious diary entries to remind me of this).

     Spirit is a tricky beast. This is where morality and dreaming come into play. I think that it takes a lot more than physical or mental exercise to make a healthy spirit. Otherwise, I could just go for a run, play tennis, or volleyball and read, play boggle, or pictionary everyday and be set. My spirit can only be healthy when I discipline myself to do good and to choose right over wrong. I may not consider myself Catholic (because I hate religious dogma), but I know that my parents chose to raise me that way because they believed in having a moral code. My dad at one point last year (regarding the fact that I don't go to church and that I was not going to have a Catholic wedding) looked at me very seriously and told me that he was worried about my soul. I spent quite some time worrying about it too. (I am sorry to any of my Catholic readers, because I have not started going to church again) Now I sincerely believe, after deep consideration of my own father's words, that God (and I do believe in God) is more loving, forgiving, and accepting than any person on this earth can even imagine. This is the God that I choose to believe in, and I hate the idea of fearing Him. It is not my religious beliefs that make up my spirit anyway. It is my attitude, will power, instincts, intuition, aspirations, and my own moral code.
     Body, mind, and spirit collectively make up our essence. They are incredibly intertwined with one another. A psychological issue can manifest into a physical ailment, people! I think that we need to challenge ourselves to involve our mind and spirit in our physical activities, to consider our body and spirit during mental activity, and to be present in body and mind when we go into our spiritual place. Banish feelings of shame, worry, and guilt from this trinity because they create imbalance.