Woo-hoo coffee!

I'm back on the coffee. Phew! That was a crazy month of not drinking any! I started taking anti-anxiety meds, so I can once again be friends with coffee. However, I am not drinking the 12 cups per morning that I was before I burned myself out on it. For awhile there, even the smell of it made me ill. Funnily enough, I did the exact same thing last Thanksgiving Break. I wonder if it will happen again next Thanksgiving?

Part of the problem is that there is just a lot of crappy, nasty-tasting, weak coffee out there. Which leads me to make the following appeal. (Oh, and coffee makes me kind of mean).

Dear middle-aged ladies who work at Starbucks:
Please don't be making my lattes. You can never get it right. I always know before you hand me my standard double-tall-skinny vanilla latte that you are confused by the "skinny" part of my request and are wondering whether when I say skinny I mean just skim milk or skim milk and sugar-free syrup.

I don't know what happened to last year's decree that from now on "skinny" at Starbucks refers to the combination of skim milk and sugar-free syrup, but after about two convienient weeks of only having to use one word to describe two components of my standard latte, you all became confused at the word "skinny."

Now it's nearly impossible to get the most important component of my coffee right, (the double part, i.e. two shots of espresso), because you all get so hung up on the mf-ing sugar content of the syrup. Honestly I could care less what kind of milk or syrup you put in my latte. You could put goat piss and sand in there for all I care; the important thing is that there be TWO shots of espresso to keep the cloyingly sweet syrup from making my latte too sugary and therefore NASTY--especially if we're talking sugar-free syrup, which is at least 1000 times sweeter than regular syrup.

So from now on please leave the latte-making to the youngsters because--whether perky or sullen--they understand that a latte is not a Diet General Foods International Caffe Vienna, and therefore they recognize the importance of the espresso content.

Thanks,
Jenny

Random Bits

If someone told you that your office Christmas party would take place at the Nampa, Idaho Olive Garden, would you think it was just a bad joke? Like from one of those really lame wanna-be mockumentary sitcoms on TBS? Or a comedy sketch written by high school sophomores? Well, it's no joke; my office Christmas party is literally going to be held at the Olive Garden in Nampa, Idaho. This is so amazingly lame that I'll not comment further, except to say that I may have to get a part-time job elsewhere just so I may attend a cool Christmas party. (Though I am grateful to have a job and therefore an office Christmas party to attend.) I did an image search for "Nampa Olive Garden" and here is one photo that I found, by Shawn Records, titled Lena's House, Nampa (I can't post it here because that would be stealing). I don't know what it has to do with the Olive Garden, but it accurately sums up my attitude toward the Nampa Olive Garden. Check out the rad photography website where I found it, called Hey, Hot Shot!.

Have you ever worked with someone who was well-meaning but annoying? Today in the break room, I had a sandwich to heat up. As I went to place it in the toaster oven, a coworker who was heating something in the microwave grabbed a plate out of the cupboard and insisted, "Maybe you should put this under it!" "I don't mind if the bread gets burned," I told her, but she insisted, "I'm just worried the cheese will melt all over and make a big mess!" It's true that the sandwich contained Havarti cheese, which is the meltiest cheese on the planet (mmm, melty cheese), and it's also true that when anything falls into the toaster oven and burns it smells up our entire building. So maybe I was being a bit cavalier about my sandwich-heating, but I am an adult, goshdarnit. My coworker expressed her intention to place a sign in the break room reading "Your mother does not work here." I found this a bit ironic.

I found a cool website called The Daily Aphorism, which publishes a bold-font aphorism each day. You can print them off or subscribe to have an aphorism emailed to you daily. Today's aphorism is "the mundane is to be cherished," a quote by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. This is a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with, which is why I printed it off and used it as the decoration for my decorate-your-own coffee mug. I purchased this mug about 6 months ago but couldn't find anything I really wanted to display on it until now.

Speaking of coffee, I've gone without coffee for the past several days and I find I am much less cranky and irritable. I usually drink coffee from the time I wake up until my lunch break at 12:30, but I've discovered that coffee really amps up my anxious, aggressive, and grumpy tendencies. It also seems to rev up my appetite, and some days by midmorning my stomach growls and churns like it's trying to digest my internal organs. I've backed off from coffee, at least for now, but I still drink caffeinated tea and soda, (tea is what I'm drinking out of that mug) . Cutting out coffee definitely takes the edge off, since, as some of you know, I can be a bit irascible at times. ;)

Everybody Needs to Read this Book Now!

What are you doing right now? If you answered anything other than reading Learned Optimism, you should maybe reconsider and decide to read it instead of whatever you were doing.

This book is so good that the Department of Health and Welfare should issue a copy of it to every household in America.

Learned Optimism deals with the impact pessimism has on a person's life, especially the influence pessimism has on depression. Dr. Martin Seligman has spent over 40 years studying the link between pessimism and depression, concluding that pessimism negatively reinforces and prolongs depression and causes people to become helpless and inactive in their lives. So, what your mother always told you about thinking positive has been clinically proven to be true.

This all sounds like, "duh" stuff, especially if you are familiar with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, but the book has tests you can take to find out how optimistic/pessimistic you are and how prone to depression you are. Seligman also includes tests he gives to kids to find out how optimistic/pessimistic/prone to depression they are. If you have or work with kids, you should seriously check this out, because Dr. Seligman discusses how easily children (and adults) can change the habit of rationalizing/explaining bad experiences from a pessimistic style to an optimistic style, making it easier to bounce back from hardship or failure and keep trying.

I'm only half way through this book, but I already feel like it's helped me immensely. As Dr. Seligman has found, there are certain people (many of whom are women) who ruminate over and over again on things in their life, which I've also heard of as repetitive destructive thinking. Rumination can be a very destructive force for pessimistic thinkers because it causes you to analyze and re-analyze and reinforce negative thoughts, causing you to become depressed and unable to do...well, anything, really.

I am a ruminator. This is why I had so much trouble working at the call center, because there were many MANY negative encounters at that place--at least half of all conversations or interactions involved complaining, yelling, put-downs, etc. I would end up going over and over them again in my mind until I just didn't want to do anything except think about those things constantly, like women who would scream from the beginning of a phone call to the end that they were going to sue our company or get people fired or kill their delivery driver--all because delivery was running late on some nonessential item like eyeshadow. (Even non-customer interactions at that place were negative. Between the bad feelings caused by negative phone encounters and the bad feelings caused by management-union power struggles, that place was a nightmare. I always felt like I was in prison while I worked there. Let me reiterate how glad I am that I don't work there anymore. I am sorry that place is being closed down because I don't want people to lose their jobs, but I hope they can find somewhere happier to work. I'm pretty sure "Call Center" is one of Dante's nine levels of hell).

I think I see some unfortunate souls with headphones in the bottom third here:

That was quite a digression, but I really want to stress how awful and destructive it is to ruminate over negative thoughts. It is stupid. If you find you think constantly about bad things that have happened or worry about bad things that might happen, you should definitely take a look at Learned Optimism. You also may want to look at the website called MoodGym, which has exercises to help rid you of those negative repetitive thoughts.

Anxiety

You know that feeling when you just get anxious for no reason? Well that is how I feel right now. It went away the whole time I was in school, but now it's back, and I think it wants to make up for lost time!

I hate you, anxiety!