Dear Coffee: What happened to us?

An Open Letter to my Coffee Addiction:

My Dearest Coffee,

We seem to have hit a rough patch of late.  Maybe it's spite.  Maybe it's biological resistance.  Maybe it's just that I'm getting old.

Don't know what I'm talking about?  Well, coffee, let's take a walk down memory lane.  You and I had a bit of a rough start.  From my very first taste and all through high school, I thought you were absolutely disgusting.  Coffee is bitter and flavorless and overall just empty.  I never could stomach it.  When I went to Starbucks, I drowned my cup so much, I might as well have been drinking coffee-flavored milk.

And then my first internship rolled around.  I needed to be up by 7:00 AM if I wanted a decent day, but I was not exactly cognizant that early in the morning.  And there it was -- the break room coffee pot, only 10¢ per cup.  Plus, all the cool old people were doing it.  I took the dive.

Eeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuuuuggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Nope.  Still disgusting.  BUT, in my poor-college-student scrounging activities, I found something else - free bags of cocoa.  If I mixed a small teaspoon in with the brown muck, I could actually make it tolerable.

And therein were the beginnings of my downfall.

Kinsey Scale Rating: 2

Confession # I-have-lost-count-and-will-probably-not-continue-counting-them-because-laziness:



And, yes, I did like it.

You wake up in a dark room

Confession #4:  I am really, really, really bad with horror.

Thrillers can be ok, though they make me jump.  Gorey things though... not so much.  Zombies, slashers, all those kinds of things squick me out, which is weird, because I have no aversion to seeing blood.  It's not just movies, either.  Even reading Wikipedia plot summaries is a risky business for me.  Why?  Because I have an incredibly overactive imagination.  Just the words themselves evoke images of splattered entrails and screaming teenage blondes and disembodied limbs and...

Confessions of a Lazy Workaholic

Science is rough.

Having to do science as a job can be pretty rough, too, at times.  Not because I require an excessive amount of brain power to accomplish it, but because the amount of patience required to complete it should be considered saintly.  Wikipedia defines science as "a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."  It has its flaws, but it's not a bad definition, particularly the "testable" part.  It's all about experimentation and guessing, which means that 50% of my day is spent punching myself in the face when something goes wrong.  That's on a good day, mind you.

So I go home and rail against the wind because I don't understand anything and I can't make my sh** work.  It creeps into my subconscious when I'm lounging about in my underwear, trying not to think about anything at all.  At my old (probably more stressful) job, sometimes I had nightmares about things not working.  I would obsess about it during the day and let it sour my mood at night.

It's just a job, I try to convince myself.  But then if it's just a thing I do to pay the bills, why do I spend 1/3 of my day there?  Why do I waste 33% of my life on something that I don't care enough about to be more passionate about?

I'm talking faster to myself in my head -- it shouldn't be "just a job", right?  Shouldn't it be a passion? Because let's face it, Victoria, it's the only thing in this world that you're ever really going to affect, and you don't even have that much of an impact.

No, no, no, can't I use it to help the world?  Are you kidding me?  The world doesn't want your help, and your arms aren't long enough. Just you in your tiny corner of science where you're MacGyver'ing equipment with mismatched parts because you're not important to have the things you need to make real data because no one actually gives a sh** about what you produce.

And now I'm screaming at myself -- it's because you gave up to early; you should have stuck it out, shouldn't have listened to your father, should've just gone for your PhD and learned how to really think, amassed the knowledge you needed to make a difference.

It's not too late!  I could go back! Go back for a masters, just to start, just to see if I can do it.

Laughable - you don't have that kind of discipline.  Go back to your tiny world and your complacency.  Your job is good enough.  You do enough.  We're done here.

So I let it go, not thinking about it, letting myself be content with what I have, until the next time something breaks, and the cycle starts again.

Until the next.

I have a co-worker named Phuoc (whom I've never met)

This post is not about him, though.  I just couldn't think of a better title, and inadvertently, he's the reason I'm writing it.

I tend to reminisce at inopportune moments. For example, when I'm on an international web conference call, and his name pops up on the list of attendees, and all I can think to myself is, "That must be a really unfortunate name for someone who deals with a largely American English-speaking based clientele on a regular basis; I wonder if it's a Vietnamese name, it sounds fairly Vietnamese; actually, it sounds a whole lot like Phuong; I wonder how that girl is doing; I should look her up on Facebook."

And before I know it, someone is tapping me on the shoulder because I'm supposed to advance to the next slide.

True facts, guys, I only think in stream-of-consciousness.

Anywho, in a rather roundabout way, this is me telling you the story of my maybe-not-so-evil twin, Phuong.

Confession #2:  I'm not always an understanding person.

Journey Before Destination

I'm not nearly as well-read as I once was as a child.  The unfortunate truth is, I often lack the patience for reading, particularly on days when I get bad cases of FOMO and feel like it's a waste of time for me to be sitting and reading.  I think I'm missing the bigger picture, though.  Further, as a writer, my ability to write is probably severely diminished.

To that end, since last year, I've tried to make a much larger effort to keep reading.  I've recently been introduced to the concept of audiobooks.  I was initially very skeptical.  How is listening to someone read a book any different from plopping down in front of the tube?  Well, actually, pretty different.  I find that I'm still using all the same brain functions to read between the lines, make predictions, and process the meanings of unfamiliar words.  The only difference is, I hear it in some voice actor's silky tones instead of my own stumbling chatter.

One of my recent reads is Words of Radiance, a book of the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson.  So far, there are only two books in the series, but they are fantastic.  It's difficult for me to pinpoint just what I enjoy about the books, but as someone who never read epic fantasies as a child, it really makes me wish I had expanded my reading horizons a lot earlier in life.  Part of what draws me to them, though, I think, is the main voice actor - Michael Kramer.  Here's an example of his work from the first book, The Way of Kings.

If I could bottle a voice and make sweet love to it every night before I went to bed, I would never need a vibrator again.

Sometimes the radio is my worst enemy

Confession/Unpopular Opinion #1:  I don't hate the song "Blurred Lines".

"What the hell, Victoria.  Aren't you a feminist?"

Yes, I believe in equal rights for men and women.  But when I listen to the song on the radio or read the lyrics, I honestly don't get all that angry.  I've read some of the arguments against the song, how misogynistic it is and how it promotes rape culture, but... Iunno.  It just reads like a cocksure guy hoping to get laid with a hot chick.  It's pretty chauvinistic, it's a dumb song, yeah, and the music video is just plain gross.

Not that I dislike boobs.  Actually, quite the opposite.

Would this have happened with Google Fiber?

An open letter to Comcast (and Marmit, my Customer Service Rep for today):

Dear Comcast,

When it comes to Internet, I haven't really had much of a choice in the past.  Either Verizon wasn't available, or there was already an existing ISP in whatever hovel I was renting, so it was either you or the campus wifi, which had a useful off-campus radius of about 5 nanometers.

I like to think we've had a pretty good relationship these past five-ish years.  I always paid my bills on time, and despite your significantly less than promised speed of 25 Mbps, you always gave me, at least, a stable Internet connection.  Sure, I might have slighted you a bit by calling you up to let you know, "No, really, I don't need any cable," and then once more than I bought my own modem, thus eliminating my need for your $10/month rental fee, but I really thought those were minor things. Apparently, I was wrong, and being the vindictive ex-girlfriend that you are (which - c'mon, man - you're not even an ex), you decided to get back at me, big time.

A Role of the Dice

In case there was ever any question - I am a giant nerd.  But I never thought of myself as the top tier of nerd.  There was always one really specific aspect of nerdom that was missing from my life.

Until this weekend.

Aww yissss

Maineventure Part 5: Land Ho!

Our last full day of our trip, C and W wanted to spend a little time with us.  We had already done the hiking thing, and I was hoping to be a bit of a passive tourist, so the four of us decided on a "cruise" around the islands to the southeast of Mt. Desert.

More boats!

Maineventure Part 4: Tea and Popovers

I confess that when I travel, one of the most important things for me to do is sample the local cuisine. Lobster and blueberries, we already accomplished the first day on Mt. Desert, but there were some little hidden gems that I was determined to try, too.

One of the main things I was really excited to try was Teahouse 278, located in the town of Bar Harbor, arguably one of the more well-known towns in the Mt. Desert area of Maine.  As such, we decided to make an entire day trip of Bar Harbor.

Maineventure Part 3: Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Admittedly, there aren't a lot of outdoorsy activities that I enjoy.  Of this smallish list, I would readily list kayaking as my number one.  I've been kayaking on the Allegheny River a number of times when I still lived in Pittsburgh, and when I was in the suburbs of Philadelphia, growing up, there was a local park where a person could kayak on the pond for a couple of hours.  But in each situation, conditions were always pretty placid, and I always had pretty good control of my vessel.  Not so this day.

Maineventure Part 2: The Manliest Man

Dear friends and readers, as many of you know by now, for all my love of baking and sewing, I have some very un-feminine hobbies.  Martial arts, boxing, blue-streak cursing.  I also work in a very non-feminine environment.  Probably about 20+% of the world's engineers are women, and that number definitely felt smaller when I was in a plant.

What I'm trying to say is, I've been around a lot of men in my time.  All kinds.  Loud, meek, burly, refined.

But on this sojourn to the far North of this here United States, I can comfortably say that I have met and briefly resided with the world's manliest man alive.  So manly, even Teddy Roosevelt must tip his hat.  So endowed with masculinity, Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson would shed a single tear. Readers, this is A:

So manly, I was too scared to get a good picture.

Maineventure Part 1: Ducks, Portland, and Sweet Hol(e)y Donuts

As I mentioned yesterday, earlier in the summer, my sister and the BIL invited me to stay with them at their summer home in Maine.  Given that DG and I had been hoping for a nice getaway for ages, we eagerly took them up on the offer.  So, the second week of August was spent mostly in the Mt. Desert area of Maine.

Side note - Mt. Desert is pronounced more like "Mount Dessert" by the locals.  Why?  Because the area was named by the French, who would have called it something more like "Mont Désert", and there's nothing sexier than Franglais.  The more you know.

B.E.D.I.S Year 3: The Prisoner of Azkaban

I think I blinked and August ran away before I could even see it.  Funnily enough, I did a lot this August, but it hardly feels as though I had time to cross off the last days of July, and now it's already September 1st.  Yes, friends, I am going through with this foolhardy project of mine for the third year running.  

And so, we unfurl this year's logo: