I was looking around on Facebook tonight, and it put me into a strange mood. I was just wasting time with the Red Sox on in the background, mindlessly flipping through "friends" profiles, looking at pictures of them enjoying summertimes gone by with people I know, or used to know, or have never seen before... familiar faces I have not seen in who knows how long, personalities I miss, experiences I remember fondly...

Anyways. I got into another nostalgic mood, but not a warm, fuzzy one. It does not constitute a very expressive conscience for me. I do not remember what I wanted to write about when I started this, so instead I suppose I will just take the easy way out and share some pictures.

Strange Days

I just finished working a 13 hour shift at Starbucks, and I came home to my mother calling 911 because my brother Brian needed to go to the hospital. It was a pretty standard thing, as far as Brian needing to be in a hospital, but when he needs immediate oxygen and it is nighttime, it gets a little more tense, and not for reasons most people would think. It is more of a distress for my family to clean up our house for all of the firemen and paramedics that will soon be barging through our door than it is to deal with Brians STAT levels being low. Brian is always teetering on the brink of needing to be hospitalized, which my mother and family are all quite accustomed to. But our house is always teetering on the brink of being unfit for my moms standards of what a clean house should look like when expecting guests. So when that phone call must be made, a preliminary mini-whirlwind of cleaning is immediately thrown into action.

I always know when this cleaning is going to happen, because my mom comes from Brian's room, where she has been for the last 15 or 20 minutes trying all she can to equalized Brian's heart rate and oxygen levels, and she sighs loudly as she briskly walks past the living room and right up the stairs to her bedroom where she changes from her pajamas into something more presentable to emergency response personnel. Its kind of silly how I can gauge Brian's condition by the amount of time my mom allows us to clean up before the call to 911 is placed.

So far, the times I have experienced feel like those five rushed minutes before the first house guests of a large party are expected to be arriving, where all the basics are reexamined: There are parking spaces available in the driveway, the path between the door and the Man of the Hour are clear, and the place looks organized. My mom usually does not allow any more time for frivolous deeds, such as preparing a pot of coffee for those hard working EMTs, or going through the fridge to find some finger snacks for them to sample while they redirect Brian's oxygen supply from the house tank to the sheik new ultra-slim mobile model.

The first thing I always notice when the ambulance and multiple firetrucks arrive and the emergency crew make their way into Brian's room is how serious they are. They sure do prepare themselves for some tense moments ahead. Tonight, officer Smitty, a policeman I have known decently well for most of my life, was the first to come in the door, looking out of breath and concerned. I did not expect him, and my surprise and delight at seeing him surprised and confused him in turn.

"Oh, hey! How are you, Smitty?"
"... Uh... ok, how are you? Huh? Is there an emergency?!"
"Oh, yeah. First door on your left down that hallway."

Fortunately for the rest of the firemen, paramedics and police officers, I did not know any of them. Instead, it was my crazily popular father. There wasn't one man who entered our house that my dad didn't know by their first name.

"Johnny, how are ya? Bill, lookin' good. Teddy, Teddy, Teddy, you rascal. Uh oh, here comes trouble..."



It was a hilarious procession of people changing polarized emotions much faster than they had expected, going from concerned people trained to deal quickly with a wide variety of different medical situations, to old friends and neighbors who haven't caught up with the happenings of each others lives in a while. It was silly, and it was weird, and it was normal. My mom handles every situation like the one tonight with grace and authority, my dad was some grounded comic relief, and I just had to keep up. Another night with the McDonald family. This must be the place.

Waking up is Hard to Do

When my alarm went off this morning, I knew that its familiar, annoying sound meant I needed to get out of those 8-hour-warm blankets surrounding my body and make myself a tasty fruit smoothie to start the day. I knew that I should get up with a start, with plenty of time to stretch out, take a shower, eat, read some of the news, and then make my way proudly to work.

But I pressed that snooze button again and again, and stayed in that lovely, warm bed of mine until all of my pre-work activities were thrown into a jumbled, fast forwarded rush to get to Starbucks on time. I made the smoothie first, and enjoyed that in the shower, after which I brushed the delightful taste of it away with baking powder toothpaste, threw on my clothes, grabbed a gallon of water and headed out the door. It was just how I remembered.

Is procrastination something I could define as my lifestyle?


Well, I'm exaggerating. I wasn't that bad this morning, and I've been a lot better lately. Wanting to keep up my running schedule should help me become even better at getting to bed earlier so I can wake up and run before work... but thats all futuretalk.

Today was a big, caffeine-fueled blur. I met so many new people, had to read hundreds of pages of information about cleaning protocol, how to treat and converse with customers to make them not only like their experience in Starbucks, but like it so much that they will be returning as regular customers for "up to nine years", had yet another round of coffee tasting, and then... the dreaded Technology Based Tutorial on using a register. Man, that is going to be the bane of the first few weeks of my Starbucks experience. There are way too many different names for drinks in this store. By the end of the tutorial, I had to run a five person gauntlet of orders, with hardly any assistance whatsoever... It was a complete failure. I failed one because I forgot to offer to bring the drinks to the picture of the lady in the wheelchair (which was only on the screen for about 10 seconds), I failed the next because hazelnut is the default flavor of a latte and does not have to be added on as an additional flavor, the third because I left the bathroom unchecked for 10 minutes, resulting in crackheads converting it into a meth lab, and the last because I referred to the customer with an ethnic slur. You win some, you lose some.

I'm tired, and I want tomorrow to be the first attempt at waking up extra early for an hour long run before work. Yawn. Goodnight.

First Impressions of Nostalgia

At noon today, I reported for an unofficial first day of duty at my local Starbucks, where I will be employed for the next bit of my life. But I suppose that is getting ahead of myself.

A few months ago, with my head hung slightly low, feeling defeated and confused, I packed up all of my most necessary items from my bedroom in the house in Brookline, NH I had been living in for the last two years and headed back to my one consistent home in Wayland. The deterioration of the New Hampshire house was slow and steady, but when I arrived there after work one day and there was no longer anything resembling a kitchen where one used to be, I knew something was seriously wrong. The demolition up to the destruction of the kitchen was a process of gutting rooms and removing walls, which was fine because it made the acoustics of the rooms very nice for playing music in, and did not affect my standards of living. Without a kitchen, and also without a job that afforded me the luxury of being served all my meals in nice restaurants, I had a big problem. I could no longer physically survive there, and with the previous two years' house projects as evidence of how slowly things were moving, I had little hope of a quick reassembling of a functioning kitchen. Enough was enough.

That is the basics of the last two years of my life culminating in being back home, out of ideas and creativity, and feeling like a rat who has abandoned a sinking ship. I hoped that a great job would fall into my lap, and it did not, so Starbucks it is. Anything for some money. I have plans. I have health. I have youth. I just need to find confidence and direction.


No more summer, no more lovely vacation on Cape Cod... Nope, not for me. Back to working.

And that brings me back to the beginning. I arrived at Starbucks at noon for a meet-and-greet style introduction to the store and the employees who happened to be there, and to taste the first of a long line of different coffees I must accustom myself with in the next few months. I have the hang of most corporate, retail-styled stores and their inner workings, but reading the Safety At Starbucks booklet was pretty informative. For instance, if a civil disorder were to break out in the glossy suburb of Wayland, I should "remove exterior tables, chairs and trash cans as these can be used to damage the store or gain entrance into it". Excellent thinking, but I would rather enjoy watching some irate, rioting 40-something soccer moms throw chairs at the windows of their favorite coffee spot after being refused entrance during their tear across downtown Cochituate.

So, back to Corporate America, back to smiling incessantly, back to schedules... but also, back to money in the bank (without a ridiculous rent to pay), back to enjoying freedom, back to an open canvas. This must be the place.