the evil empire

I was supposed to meet with my boss today. Actually, we were supposed to meet on Monday. But really we were supposed to meet last Friday. My boss is difficult to get a hold of sometimes. I wasn't stressing about it. I hate meetings anyway. My boss is a pretty cool guy, but it's just meeting itself that bothers me. I'd rather just do it and not talk about it. We can fix any problems that arise along the way. I never leave a meeting thinking, 'wow. I'm glad we had that meeting.'

I asked my boss if we were going to meet today, and he said, 'yeah, just give me a minute,' which is what he usually says when I ask him that question. One out of every four or five times I ask, we actually meet. Again, I'm not stressing about this, that's just how it goes.

About an hour or so later, he comes to me and says, 'I'm going to get coffee, you want to come along? We'll talk about stuff on the way.' I don't drink coffee, but it's nice to get out of the office, so I grab my page of notes and follow along.

We went to get coffee at a Starbucks. Until this summer, I had never been inside a Starbucks, which is a piece of information that startles most people when I tell them. There are a variety of different reasons for this. The first being that when I was drinking coffee, Starbucks had just started its plan for world coffee domination. Being new and exciting, everyone was going to Starbucks, which meant ridiculous lines, which meant I couldn't be bothered. Also, when I was a coffee drinker, I was also rather poor, and since my coffee drinking wasn't of the compulsive variety (I never needed that cup of coffee in the morning; I only drank it when I felt like it), I didn't see the point in paying $3 for a cup. I only really drank coffee because I wasn't old enough to get into bars yet, and going to a diner or 24-hour donut shop were my only options for late night hangouts. One buck for a cup of coffee covered hours worth of loitering. Alcohol soon replaced caffeine, and I found that I never really liked the jitters that a cup of coffee gave me.

On occasion, if I'm really completely zonked and need to be awake, I'll take a small cup of coffee, black with no sugar (coffee tastes like shit, be honest, and no matter what hazel nut bullshit or Eqyptian this or that you toss in, it still tastes like coffee, so why try to hide it?), but those instances are few and far between.

My avoidance of Starbucks has nothing to do with it being a giant, all-devouring, Wal-Mart-like evil corporation, though it is, it's just a logistical decision. I don't think you can get a small cup of black coffee at a Starbucks anyway. However, since this past summer (in Washington, my friend and ex-roommate worked at one, which was the cause for my first visit), I've been in Starbucks two or three additional times, each time was with my boss.

The interior of a Starbucks is truly perplexing to me. The two I've seen were all wood and brick with quaint tables and bookshelves and things of that nature. In the Starbucks downtown, the one I went to today, there are always tons of people doing work and talking and just kind of hanging out. Today was no different. It was packed, though no one seemed to be buying coffee. The majority of the customers were unbelievably beautiful women (there were good looking guys there too, but my focus was elsewhere). They were nicely dressed, for the most part. One, a blonde who was standing in front of me at the condiments table was decked out in a stunning, form fitting business suit. She was probably just a year or two older than me. I couldn't really make eye contact. Another was your typical California girl--blonde, blue eyed and stairmaster-fit. She wore her long hair down and it was bouncy like something out of a shampoo advertisement. She walked past me to sit down next to her square-jawed, hunkish boyfriend with the starting quarterback's physique. It was then that I began to notice that I was easily the ugliest person in the Starbucks (it was like Death Cab for Cutie show deja-vu). In addition to the two more traditional beauties I mentioned, there was also a collection of sexy Asian women, sexy librarians, and girls next door types. In addition to the upsetting beauty factor, some hipster dude typed away on his sleek new Mac laptop. Pseudo-intellectuals talked about some book-learnin' shit at a table by the window. There were dudes with the man purse. It was kinda like being in a living version of an upscale catalog. I ain't trying to hate on nobody; I'm just saying. If a new Volkswagen Beetle convertible pulled up and four girls in tennis skirts with iPods showed up chatting about The OC, I probably wouldn't have batted an eyelash.