Category: Blog

I saw a meme on Twitter of Spiderman sitting in the rain. It was captioned, “When you were 8 and your crush left you for the dude that was faster than you.” This brought back memories of how I dated a kid named Ryan at the end of 6th grade. He caught a football at recess, one-handed, that was heading straight for my face. He was my hero.

I tried to Google him just now, but weirdly I can’t find him on anything. He does have a generic name I guess. But I was disappointed to come up short with my research, because I’m usually pretty good at finding people solely by typing in, like, “Ryan, NYC, Project Manager, LinkedIn, Plymouth State.” Any combination of their location, job title, or school usually pulls up a LinkedIn profile. And I have no shame looking, even though I know it’ll say, “1 person from Anheuser-Busch viewed your profile.” If you actually check your LinkedIn profile views then my guy you aren’t someone I wanna be with anyways – so reject me all you’d like.

During the summer before 7th grade, and all through the school year, I dated Ryan even though his mom made him take a year off to be homeschooled. His grades were pretty terrible. This was a relationship where we barely texted. I mean, we’d send affectionate AIM messages here and there. But deep down, I knew it couldn’t last. Even if I did get him a Christmas gift and sent it home with my best friend (Molly) because they lived close enough for her to deliver it for me.

Ryan ended up coming to our 7th grade Spring dance. I hadn’t seen him in nearly an entire year despite dating him for that long. We didn’t even call each other on the phone. One football catch and 365 days of loyalty… Only to break up after sharing one last dance to Far Away by Nickelback.

I have other embarrassing grade school dating stories, too. See also: dating someone for all of 8th grade that never kissed me, and then leaving him for my friend at the time who said he’d be my first kiss if I really wanted one before high school started. We made out to the title credits of Guitar Hero while my dad took a nap on the couch downstairs. I’ll never forget how he sent me one of those chain texts that was like, “SEND THIS TO 10 FRIENDS NOW OR ELSE YOU’LL LOSE YOUR LOVE FOREVER” and attached to the message was a heart .gif and an audio to Nelly’s Dilemma ft. Kelly Rowland. Yes, the one where she uses an Excel spreadsheet as a text message in the music video.

It gave me the ick before giving someone the ick was a thing. I forget why that relationship ended. But no matter, soon enough I was off to high school. And from there, things only got worse. My high school sweetheart seduced me by configuring a “K” design into his 9×9 Rubik’s cube.

I truly was (and still am) a fucking loser.

One time this guy said I treated him like “the flavor of the week.” The only effect it had on me was that I played the American Hi-Fi song of the same title (circa Now 7) on repeat all day: nearly blasting a speaker in my car. I think about this sometimes because I find myself singing sad songs in a fun, scary way that suggests I don’t emote.

I told the same guy once that I couldn’t believe I fell for someone who liked the Chainsmokers. He genuinely got mad about this and would quote it back to me when we’d get in fights. It was as if the comment was so gut-wrenching, so insulting, that I had obliterated a part of his soul by speaking it aloud. Maybe I did.

And maybe I don’t emote.

It’s the morning after the Super Bowl.

I’ve realized that the best way to make secondary plans is within close proximity to your primary plans. That way, you have excuses to not attend any tertiary plans you aren’t interested in. You can just pull the whole, “Sorry, I’m double booked this week and I’ll probably need to recharge” line.

For example: I had to work until 11pm last night. I feared that one of my coworkers might suggest staying later to drink and socialize, which I very obviously did NOT want to do. So to combat such a scenario, I planned both my H&R Block tax appointment (very adult) and my dentists’ appointment (only semi-adult) to be early the next morning. In New Hampshire. And as a result, drinking and socializing became tertiary. Voilà, “I cannot attend.”

I bring all of this up purely to segue into the fact that I had a dentists’ appointment today. I established care, as they like to call it, with a new office. There’s no environment quite as good at breeding rare terminology and offbeat compliments than the dentists’ office. And I’m not talking about when they said I have “strong, beautiful teeth and a healthy gum line (humblebrag).” I’m talking about when Lisa, who looked to be about 70, informed me that she was going to start scraping away at my teeth. Except she didn’t say it that way. No, what she actually said was, “I’m going to be stealing some treasures.”

On one hand, a part of that sounds fun. Almost like an underwater adventure. I pictured that “Deep Sea Diving” game in Mario Party, where you have to repeatedly tap A to swim to the bottom of the ocean, pick up a treasure chest, and then swim back up: all while avoiding the sharks. Cool, Lisa’s just trying to go on a playful little excursion with me!

On the other hand, referring to the built-up calculus on my teeth as, “treasures” made me view Lisa as a gross monster who collects these types of disgusting things in jars atop her apothecary. The go-to image in my head was, like, if you were to take the fortunetelling eyeball chicks from box-office sensation Hercules (starring Danny Devito as Phil) and mix them with any classic green Halloween witch… that would be Lisa. I imagined a world where she referred to my tooth calculus as, “her precious,” as she reached up on her tippy toes to store it in the cupboard just-so.

Unrelated to Lisa: my last dentists’ office used to tell me my teeth, “had character.” I kind of always thought that was mean. Because I knew they weren’t talking about some hot, Tyler Durden Fight Club-cool character. They were talking about some goofy nerd guy who, even for acquiring some level of fame in Hollywood, might still find it hard to fuck someone. I’d say think Michael Cera, except now he’s a cult favorite on Twitter. So maybe it’s more along the lines of the guy who plays The Riddler in the new Batman movie. The one that’s essentially a three hour music video for Nirvana’s, “Something in the Way.”

It’s now 1:45pm. I’m at my parents house, and I’m going to take a nap with my curtains drawn. If the curtains are drawn, does that mean they’re open, or closed? Does it rely on the context of the sentence? Alright see ya.

There’s a coffee shop around the corner from my work that serves the softest, warmest chocolate chip cookies. They also makes the creamiest iced mocha possible to the palate. The coffee shop is called Seven Grams.

I’m afraid to claim it as my coffee shop, because it’s actually my manager’s manager’s coffee shop. So while I’m over here saving my Starbucks venti plastic cups and reusing them at home just to fabricate the feeling that I bought my coffee, she shows up to work with a cup from Seven Grams every day. Keep in mind, the coffee I make at home makes me want to jump off of a skyscraper. It’s the equivalent of a vodka soda with lime: it does what I need it to, but I’m not enjoying it. Anyways, this isn’t about my coffee. It’s about Seven Grams.

Seven Grams is a bit of a treat to me. If I’m feeling sad, feeling accomplished, or if I find some other various excuse to spend $7 on a coffee, this is where I go. And if you ever go there, please know that I’m the reason they now put plastic lids on their iced drinks.

I was running late to work one morning and said, fuck it, I might as well get a coffee on the way. It was a classic move in high school: “If you’re going to get a late warning, you might as well be as late as possible.”

So I ordered my iced mocha and carried it over to the little desk place where there’s…….. coffee condiments? What’s that about anyways? If I wanted something else in my coffee, I would’ve just ordered it that way. But at these coffee condiment desks, you can add more shit, stir your drink, and garnish your coffee with cardboard slips or weird powders. Seems unnecessary. But at Seven Grams, this is where they also keep their plastic lids. So just to reiterate: the barista will hand you your coffee WITHOUT a lid, expecting you to fend for yourself and get one at the desk.

As I type and relive this stupid insignificant story, I just remember I was upset about something that day. I can’t recall what. But it’s probably for the best since I tend to unload my issues in a really unentertaining way on my private Snapchat story for the 7 people that I have added to it. I went to put a lid on my coffee, but it just wouldn’t fit. And I knew it was the right lid because I order the same coffee every time I go to this place. Hence, I must place the same lid on my coffee each time. But on this particular day, the lid did seem a little thicker than usual. So I pushed it on when suddenly the side of my cup split. Coffee everywhere. Covering my shoes. Spreading across the floor. At the busiest time possible. So like the rational person I am, I figured I’d make matters worse by instinctively crying. The barista pulled the old, “we got a kid who dropped their ice cream” and offered to make me a new one like a sweetheart. But like, it was still embarrassing as fuck.

It was only after the fact that I noticed the lid must’ve been manufactured wrong, because it wasn’t just stuck to a second lid. Yes I can be stupid, but I’m not inherently an idiot. These two lids were inseparable: glued together and created specifically to throw a wrench in my morning.

I share this story for no reason other than the fact that I got an iced mocha from Seven Grams today, and it was delicious. I’ve been twice in the last week. But I did avoid going there from approximately November to February out of self-disgust. Please be happy for me, as I have finally overcome my fears and returned to my manager’s manager’s favorite coffee shop.