Category: Personal

With a quiz and a paper due today, and a test tomorrow, I don’t have much time to enjoy it though.

I don’t have any new cute cat pictures, so today I’ll share the random contents of my iTunes Party Shuffle:

Sunday ….. “Sunday in the Park with George”
Talking Back To The Night ….. Steve Winwood
Bomday Dreams ….. “Bombay Dreams” (London Cast)
Fallen (Radio Edit) ….. Sarah McLachlan
Big-Eyed Fish ….. Dave Matthews Band
Meet Virginia ….. Train
Live To Tell ….. Madonna
All This Time ….. Sting
Something Happened On The Way To Heaven ….. Phil Collins
Somewhere Down The Crazy River ….. Robbie Robertson

I really need to start listening to more newer artists but I don’t have the time or more important the money to start buying a lot of stuff in the hopes I’ll like some of it.

UPDATE: If you like cat blogging, Atrios has a particlarly nice shot of his gray cat this week.

I have some notes sitting around for a blog entry I was planning on posting on March 11, three and a half years after 9/11, but today’s news is upsetting enough that I’ll blog about the topic now instead.

Here’s the notes I’d started on:

Sitting in a room in the library on campus, looking out a glass window at the hills of San Francisco, and listening to some Sara McLaughlin sharply brought to mind a moment from the last vacation I took before 9/11; a few days at a ritzy spa in Arizona with my mother & sister. The moment I am thinking of was towards the end of the trip. I had had a massage and was sitting in the quiet room of the spa, enjoying some tea and looking out another glass wall at a storm coming in over the mountains. I was relaxed, and at peace. And I’m feeling pretty good today, but it occurred to me as I sit here that in a very real way, I have never felt that good ever since 9/11. With three and a half years passed since that terrible day, I am starting to wonder if I ever will feel the same way again.

I’m not as bad as I was the first few months afterwards. The horror, the pain, the feeling that my world was ripped out by the roots — they do not grip me the way they did. I’ve had to work to get to that point. As with other subjects that I know will depress and upset me, I go out of my way to not awaken the pain. It’s a reasonably successful technique – whole days can go by without me thinking of that morning. And then I do, and the pain and fear and sorrow come back.

I’m unsure whether trying not to think about things that upset me is the best possible coping tactic, frankly. But it does get me through the days and allows me to function as a reasonably normal person, most of the time.

Today was one of those days when my coping skills failed me. The thought that maybe there really was enough information out there, that there was enough to warn people; that maybe, just maybe, this madness could have been averted makes me feel like hell.

I am settling more into a regular routine now, three weeks into school. Classes four days a week, work the other three. Which means I don’t really have any days off, but some days are lighter than others.

And some are more stressful. I’ve been at Starbucks three months now. I’m pretty comfortable doing the job most of the time, but the stress level has not significantly abated and I don’t think it’s going to. The store is quite high-volume – we can get as many as 100 customers an hour – and there’s the usual mix of personalities and staff drama to cope with. It can get hectic but it’s really not all that bad.

No, the real stress comes from being located in a less than pristine part of town (Market Street, not too far from the Tenderloin). On a daily if not hourly basis, we have to deal with people who come in and try to steal anything they can lay their hands on — from our tip jar to bags of whole coffee beans — to drunks who fall asleep in the cafe and piss all over themselves and our chairs, to my personal least-favorite: junkies who shoot up in the bathroom and leave blood splatters all over the place. Sometimes they’ll leave a used syringe as a parting gift. This last is particularly unpleasant, because since you don’t know what kind of diseases the junkie might have, we have to lock down the bathroom until we can do a major disinfecting scrubdown.

I’m a lifelong city-dweller, so being annoyed by homeless people is hardly new to me, but I have to say that the homeless we have to deal with here do seem to be more distressing than the ones I dealt with in New York. Granted I never worked in a Starbucks when I was in New York, so maybe I was just oblivious to it there. I don’t know. But as much as I enjoy slinging coffee, I would definitely be happier if I could do it someplace where I did not have to deal with junkies, people who piss themselves, and petty thieves all the time.

Plus I have a quiz tomorrow and I hope I’m going to do well on it. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve had to study for this kind of test and I hope I’m retaining the right information from the readings assigned.

I have to work tonight and am not going to be able to watch any of the Super Bowl. Is “bummed out” too dated a phrase to use anymore?

Yesterday was my first day of classes at USF. I’ve spent part of this morning sorting through all the handouts I got yesterday and trying to get a handle on exactly how much time getting all my homework done is going to take.

I’m taking four courses this semester; two “quant” courses (Decision Modeling/Data Analysis and Accounting) and two “soft” courses (Leadership Dynamics and Management Communications). The ‘soft’ courses will be slightly easier in that I am a little more comfortable writing papers than I am crunching numbers, but either way it’s going to be a lot of work.

I’ve already got a paper due Tuesday and about 8 chapters of preliminary material to read through, and two classes have yet to meet this week. I’ve committed to working 3 days a week, which leaves me the other 4 to go to my classes and get all my work done. I should be able to manage, but it’s going to be pretty exhausting.

One of the things USF pushes hard is diversity and the study group I’m in for my Leadership class is pretty darn diverse. Of the five members, one is fresh off the airplane from India, another is from Thailand, and a third is from the heartland of Indiana. Then there’s me, the Jewish gal from NYC, and another girl who has lived in a number of different parts of the US. It should be interesting to see how we all work together.

On the not so bright side, I noticed that one of my professors takes what seemed to me to be gratuitous swipes at evolution/Darwin in his course notes. As much as I like to ignore the fact, I am indeed attending a Jesuit school, and I need to remember that at least some religiosity is to be expected. Hopefully I’ll be able to go on ignoring it most of the time.