Caustic Cupcake's Creepy Cupboard

Tonight, Logic Professor and I are having a Halloween Party / Housewarming. He moved in back in March and we're just now getting the house clean enough for visitors. Today.

If I had done some cleaning BEFORE last night, I wouldn't be taking off from school. If I'd known I'd be taking off from school, I would have scheduled the party for another night- Tuesday was just the least disruptive to our academic life, except that I'm disrupting anyway for the sake of not having bras slung over every lamp and bunny fur clumped up in every corner when the guests get here.

If the guests get here. Of the fifteen-odd people we invited, one confirmed. And I never called her back, because I'm an asshole lizards snuck into my bedroom while I was asleep and carried off my cell phone. Three and a half people said maybe (the half is my nephew). Two never got the invitation because it's sitting next to me on the desk, addressed, stamped, and unmailed after I dropped it in the mailbox a pterodactyl flew down, knocked over the mailbox with its tail, and shredded the letters inside to use for nest-building materials.

A handful of people said no outright; we knew it was one couple's wedding anniversary (awww!), but because the Phillies stood strong chance of making it to the World Series and playing on Monday night, we couldn't have the party on that day (since we don't have a television and everybody would leave our party to go watch the game... including us), so Anniversary Day it was. It figures that something that's never happened in the history of the World Series happened last night: the game got rained out, and they postponed it to the day of our party. Luckily for the person who's coming to our party, it got postponed AGAIN to tomorrow- a lucky thing for me since I'll be working, because the last time the Phillies won, people were getting shitfaced, people were throwing money at me, and people were running down the street naked.

LoPro and I both agree, though, that the point of this party is not to see how many people don't like us. The point is that we're being forced to get our shit in order, so after this people can stop by whenever they want.

Oh, shit, I'd better finish cleaning. The guest will be here in four and a half hours and I still need a costume. I have a costume, but if my nephew shows up I don't want to be all bloody. I have to go buy Plan B: Something Cute.

A year ago tonight, Logic Professor and I went on our first date.

*wistful sigh*

It's only gotten better.

Labels: Logic Professor, Lovelife

It's been a busy week.

I'm in bed with my laptop, weighing the relative merits of staying in bed hungry versus dragging my ass to the kitchen and feeding myself.

I'm tired.

This is just a post to push my narcissism-fest down the page a little.

I'm a busy gal today:

• There was a bake sale for the English club at school, and I coughed up a couple dozen cupcakes and manned the table for over three hours.
• I have to write a paper on Shakespeare by tomorrow. I could do it tonight, but...
• I have to leave for a singing lesson in an hour.
• I have to make a CD of singable songs to go over during the lesson, or the instructor will beat me to death with a metronome. Methodically.
• I could write my paper tomorrow, but it would have to be early; the English club has a meeting before class.

So you tell me: what are the top three things you have to do? Mine are the Shakespeare paper, the mix CD for singing, and a horrific homework assignment that involves writing citations for practice. I fucking hate writing Works Cited pages. This is why there are online citation generators.

Or: A Study In Narcissism.

The owner of the Cool Punk Rock Bar ordered us bartenders to go get professional fliers made to advertise our respective nights.

Today, Logic Professor and I took a bunch of pictures of me for my half of the Wednesday night ad. The other Wednesday bartender already had a pic from a modeling shoot.

I hated most of our pics until I started fucking around with the contrast and tint and brightness and whatnot, and now I like them all.

Modeling shoot, my ass.

Labels: Wednesday

I went down to the Cupboardsburg Coffee Shop a little after 8 am, and found it closed despite the "Hours" sign which clearly indicated that by 8 am I have the right to kick in the door and get myself a cup. I continued writing my English Lit papers about the fantastic Lanval and that trifecta of boring, difficult, and possibly irrelevant Piers Plowman for another hour or two before heading down again to see if Amit was there yet.

As he poured my coffee, he asked if I wanted to buy the store.

I said no.

Labels: At The Cupboardsburg Coffee Shop

Today I left home a little early to drop Logic Professor off at his friends' house, where he left his car last night. It was on the way to Linguistics. Even though nine hours had passed since his last drink, LoPro hadn't wanted to take a chance; after all, he'd done what, ten shots? It was enough that when I stopped by to see him, he fell over on a dog bed and let me draw a heart on his face.

I was surprised by how sweet he was. For some reason, I'd been expecting him to be a bitter drunk. Instead, I found that he just gets cuter and more innocent.

Later, I stopped by my parents' house, and told them where he was and what he was up to. My mother's indignation that the defenseless Logic Professor fell victim to peer pressure from his friends says everything you need to know about how highly she regards him. Once, when my sisters and I were doing something like yelling filthy epithets at each other across the house, she told me that she didn't like it when we talked that way in front of Logic Professor.

I can see how people keep mistaking him for Christian. On the surface, he's so clean-cut, mild-mannered, affable, and inoffensive. It doesn't take too long to find out about the humor and wit lurking beneath the banker-from-the-1950's exterior.

After I dropped him off on the street and turned around to head back to the highway, I stopped and rolled down my window to tell him again that I loved him.

The traffic was remarkably light all the way to school; I guess everyone stayed home to celebrate Columbus Day. How does one celebrate Columbus Day, by baking a cake in the shape of a ship?

* * * * *
Linguistics was awesome.

"Why are we here?" someone moaned.
"Why wouldn't we be here?" asked Cpt. Language, our professor. It was a Monday morning, after all, and if you're mired in academia you know that LEARNING WAITS FOR NO THREE-DAY WEEKEND.
"Because it's Columbus Day," the kid said bitterly.
"I thought Columbus Day was on the twelfth," replied Cpt. Language, and the kid moaned that we wouldn't have off then, either. "I don't know about you, but WE weren't here yesterday," said Cpt. Language, gesturing to the class. "What were you going to celebrate?"
"Columbus discovering America!" the kid insisted, at which time Captain Language either accidentally revealed that he didn't know who Columbus was or he was just fucking with us. He is, by the way, American. "Wait- you speak like six languages and you don't know who Columbus was?!" asked the kid.
"Why don't you ask me something about phonetics?" asked Cpt. L. "I can answer those questions."

We talked about vowels today, and practiced transcribing some common words into IPA format. A woman voiced her confusion regarding what we were supposed to do with the leftover letters from the original spelling. Cpt. L explained that we were dealing with sounds, not letters, and clapped his hand over the original word on the board. It was striking how similar his tone of voice was to that of Bambi's dad when he said "Your mother can't be with you anymore."
"Spelling is irrelevant for us now," he said, as if we had just crossed an imaginary bridge over which there could be no return.
* * * * *

Today, LoPro took his Logical Fallacy Sock Puppets to school. If you will recall, I made the first of them for him last Christmas:

His students today wanted to know where he got them, so he told them that his girlfriend made them. That unleashed a barrage of questions. Why did I make them? How did I know what fallacies were? Was I one of his students? What did I do for a
living?

First of all, he said, she's into fallacies. Second of all, hello? We talk.

When they asked what I did for a living, he told them that I was a bartender. Then they wanted to know where I worked, and he told them that he wasn't going to answer that. Why?, they wanted to know.
"Because I'm not going to let you stalk my life!" he exclaimed.
* * * * *

Tonight was my second singing lesson. My teacher is a girl my age, teaching out of her cluttered apartment. Her giant black dog likes to wander in and sit down on my feet when I'm singing. It kind of feels like home, except for the dog part.

The most useful thing she said tonight was that I need to sing louder, because if I'm going to fuck up I might as well do it loud enough for her to hear so she can fix it. I like her style.

Logic Professor had dropped me off and was waiting around the corner in the Philosomobile (is that a good name for his car? can you think of anything better?), grading. We headed down the street to our favorite Indian buffet. The location of her apartment in relation to our buffet is partially what makes Singing Gal a good fit for us.

I ate until I was disgusted with myself. But disgusted in a good way.

Now I'm heading to bed so I can wake up early and do that massive English Lit assignment I've been planning on doing for weeks. Cupboardsburg Coffee, I'll see you in the morning.

Labels: Intoxicology, Linguistics, Logic Professor

Sunday is football day, when my Logic Professor goes to do his one manly thing per week, and watches football all day with his friends. They drink and eat chicken wings. He does not.

Except today. He decided to show a little solidarity, I guess, and do six shots in half an hour.

They live two minutes down the road. I'm going to put on some pants and go over there to laugh at him. I have never seen Logic Professor drink alcohol. Maybe I'll do an experiment or two and see if he'll fall over when I shove him, or see what happens if we spin him around.

Then I'll come home and get back to my literature homework.

This is October:

Raking dead leaves and collecting fallen tree branches. The time-honored, laborious post-Halloween inter-sibling candy-trading process. Skeletons. Shriveled, hardening tomato vines in the garden that can be dragged out of the dirt in one big tangle to the trash.

The month my high school sweetheart and I started dating, all awkward and young and thinking we'd invented it, at the school dance. Listening to straight-edge hardcore albums sprawled across his old, wood-frame bed, fully-clothed. Ditching the group we went trick-or-treating with to go hide in a pile of leaves on Halloween.

The festival out in the woods that my family goes to every year: antique apple-peeling contraptions, kettle corn, handmade quilts, and cedar planks branded with the name of the festival and the year, sold for a dollar, and hanging in a column in my hallway.

Delaying as long as possible turning on the heater for the first time, but never making it to November. The sound of water running in pipes that come up out of the carpet; the deep, earthy scent of a year's worth of dust on the radiators slowly heating up.

Hayrides and haunted houses, and hating the guy at the haunted house who makes a show out of not being afraid and not screaming like everyone else, because I know that he's missing the point and he has wasted his money. Working at a haunted house to pay for a school trip during an unusually hot October. Sitting outside with the other ghouls drinking cans of soda and trying to cool off until a customer would show up, at which time we would advise them to count to 100 and then run inside to take our places. And then still scaring the ever-loving fuck out of them.

Crushing on my logic professor, a month before he found my blog and read about it, a year before we tripped over each other on campus and started emailing again. Installing an expensive email forwarding program on my outdated cell phone to be able to receive his messages while I was at work, because I couldn't bear to wait until I got home to see if he'd sent anything. Finally being asked out to dinner. Being so sick I didn't care, and driving myself to the hospital that afternoon, missing the festival and interrupting the sequence of the cedar planks. Later that week, wearing the Date Shirt- a long-sleeved purple shirt with holes in the cuffs for my thumbs- because it covered up the bruise from the IV. Being so enchanted with him that I forgot that my stomach hurt. Standing on the roof in the dark at midnight in the cool October air, waiting for the kiss we were too afraid to act on.

Going on a hayride together, and grinning at each other, stupidly, the whole time.

Last night, Logic Professor got a cryptic email from a single female student in her early thirties. All it said was something along the lines of, "After I get an A in this class, I am so buying both of us a couple gin and tonics, or whatever it is that you drink. That is, IF I get an A."

What the holy flock of Christ?!

And he denies that his students have crushes on him. Let's not forget the student who requested that he strip in class (and later, after he was no longer her teacher, called him at ten o'clock at night just to chat), or the one who texted him to say that she wished they'd met at a Starbucks instead of at school and she really appreciated his insights, or the one who told her boyfriend- a mutual friend of ours- that she would totally do him if she ever got the chance, or the handful of students who requested extra help outside of class in private and surprised Logic Professor by how much they knew about the subject and how much help they didn't need after all.

Alas, my innocent Logic Professor is mired in the assumption that nobody could have a crush on him. Good.

Still, I try to convince him that a sizable contingency of his students would strip and maul him if given a chance, because he should know. As it is, he is careful (because of his age and lack of tenure) to avoid any hint of impropriety, so it's not that I think he needs to know about these professor-eating beasts to protect himself. It's that his genuine surprise when I tell him they want to suck his existential quantifier is quite charming and cute. I hope it brightens up his day a little to know.

Labels: Logic Professor

It starts one day when you don't feel like dealing with someone. Then the next day, it's a little easier to ignore or avoid them, because you've already set a precedent. In fact, it just keeps getting easier to not call or talk, because it feels so damned good to not have to deal with them for a little while that you don't want to think about the inevitable time when you'll have to see them again. Let that continue on for long enough, though, and you'll find that the liberating feeling of avoiding a clingy friend or acquaintance isn't as liberating as it used to feel, and slowly, subtly, you have trapped yourself. You didn't notice and probably can't pin down the exact moment that it happened, but at some point you passed out of the avoidance period that could end with a friendly "Hey, haven't seen YOU in a while; how have you been?" and landed firmly into a new category that guarantees your next conversation will begin with an accusatory "Why did you stop talking to me?" See, at some point, your personal friend-vacation moved from taking a break for a while to breaking up for good, and now you've got some explaining to do. That alone is enough to cement the breakup into permanence. See them on the street, and it becomes a fight to make it seem like you don't see them walking past you in the other direction, and, moreover, to make it seem natural enough that they, too, can trick themselves into believing that it is.

Today I sucked it up and tackled the initial hurdle of resuming regular contact with my downstairs neighbor, the Cupboardsburg Coffee Shop.

Initially, I was thrilled that it was opening. Logic Professor and I went there every day- very often more than once a day- less because of the novelty of being able to get a chai latte a few steps from our door and increasingly more to support the owner, whom I shall call Amit. We'd see him sitting somberly in the illuminated window of his store after dark, staring out at the traffic, with no customers in his store. He'd be wearing his usual outfit, a nice long-sleeved button down tucked into dark slacks, which is more in line with his previous profession in the financial sector (until it tanked) than with a coffee-shop owner, and also lends to the depressiness of the image. Yes, I invented that word. By cracky it fits. "Poor Amit," we'd say as we passed. "How depressing is that?"

I admit that sometimes, my innate sympathy for struggling immigrants is sometimes misplaced. Amit has been here for fifteen years. He is not a struggling immigrant, and it's not my place to feel guilty for not being able to save his business. He began a venture unpreparedly and is now struggling after the fact.

For a while we conspired to get more people into the store. We texted all of our friends and planned to hold a game night. We offered suggestions and urged Amit to advertise as he seemed to grow more despondent, and I cringed as he continued to lower his prices to stimulate business, knowing that that couldn't bring in any more people if they didn't know that Cupboardsburg Coffee even existed.

We even hung out in the store to make it look, from the street, to be a popular establishment. It wasn't all a sacrifice. When my boyfriend was away at Nerd Camp for most of two months, I would carry my laptop downstairs first thing in the morning and internet (yes, I used it as a verb) from the coffee shop, which is not as comfortable as you'd think, given Amit's preference for stylish, modern, irregularly-shaped furniture. I could just sit there with the computer open, not even using it, drinking my coffee and nomming a brownie (yes, I verbed that one too) while watching the traffic go by. It was good for me to be essentially at home, yet out of my boyfriendless apartment. I didn't even have to put on shoes to go there. (I still did.)

Originally Amit had a partner- a man who actually came from my parents' neighborhood, where I grew up- but he has since disappeared, leaving Amit disastrously in charge, and I have not asked what happened to him. Originally there was an experienced barista behind the counter, too, but as profits didn't come in as expected, so were her hours cut back. Eventually, we were left with all Amit, all the time. Spending a lot of time in the shop exposed us to a lot of Amit.

Regrettably, it is clear that he has never worked in the service industry in any capacity, let alone in the specific role of coffee-shop management.

We let the first wave of badly or unusually prepared products go, chalking them up to inexperience. However, I now believe that much like how language must be acquired during a crucial stage of a child's development or not at all, one cannot become acclimated to working in the service industry as late in life as the owner of Cupboardsburg Coffee thought he could. He is beyond inefficient, but I'm not going to go into that. Consider yourselves blessed to have evaded the ordeal of having to read examples of Amit's stunning inefficiency; like other things I don't blog about, I know it was bad enough to live through them once, and I opt to gallantly forsake the comforts of your empathy in favor of sparing you the torture of living through any resemblance of the same experience, even as tenuous a resemblance as reading a blog post about it. Inefficiency, though, is not totally to blame for the mistakes that cropped up in our lattes nor for our discomfort spending time at the store.

Sheer lack of know-how was also a factor in the bad products Amit was churning out for a time. Dependency was the primary factor in our discomfort. While Logic Professor and I chilled on the couch with our lattes, Amit would talk to us. He had nothing else to do. He would talk to us about the business, mostly, and he wouldn't leave us the fuck alone until we left.

One night at about 8:00 we were sitting on the couch when Amit asked, out of the blue, if we'd be there for a while. "Yeah..." we tentatively said.
"Do you mind if I leave for about half an hour?" he asked. "If anyone comes in, tell them I'll be right back." He reassured us that in all likelihood, nobody would come in anyway.

Then he took off his apron. And he left us. In his store. With the lights on and the door open. "Did that just happen?!" Logic Professor asked me. Thankfully, or unfortunately, Amit was right that nobody would be in.

After that we tended to take our stuff to go. Obviously. Rather than improve, his products inexplicably got worse (see above, re: Experience-in-the-Service-Industry Acquisition Device), and a few times I dumped out what I had just paid for. Eventually, we recognized that we were merely donating, and that our donations were not enough to keep Amit afloat if he would not take a few steps our way.

The nail in the coffin was that whenever we missed a day, Amit would bring it to our attention. Missing two days was worse. The guilting would be laced with a hint of accusing. I call this treatment a guiltusation. I will not be guiltusated for failing to donate to a cause I'm not entirely sure will succeed and never even knew if it was worth it to keep donating even if it did.

That brings us to where we are now. It was so easy to renew our morning tea ritual at home, wherein the first one out of bed makes the tea and the other party makes the bed (in theory), and skip the coffee shop to avoid Amit. But the guilt set in, because despite what I've said, Amit is a nice guy and we still want him to succeed. We probably felt that we could no longer show up without an explanation before Amit felt that we could no longer show up without an explanation. Yesterday, Logic Professor bumped into him on the street. He mentioned that they had a new cook, and asked where we'd been. We knew it was the tip of the iceberg, and that a trip to the store would involve a longer explanation.

So today while Logic Professor was off teaching something about Descartes, I sucked it up and went to the store. Amit told me that we had been his best customers, and he'd wondered what happened to us, and wanted to know where we'd been. I lied. I told him that since school started for both of us, we'd been super busy; besides, I said, we'd been on vacation (true) for a while (not true). I promised he'd see more of us, knowing that it was true now that the explanation was over with. I got a cup of black coffee and fixed it at home, not wanting Amit to destroy it with an unexpected and unreasonable combination of cream and sugar and thereby reminding me of one of the reasons I'd stopped going to his store. It was delicious.

Then, having gotten over the hurdle, I went back later for a piece of poundcake.

Labels: At The Cupboardsburg Coffee Shop

At the bar the other night, a customer was talking about how she fosters kittens. Specifically, she mentioned how tiny her current kittens are. It was also revealed that she lived two blocks away. I commanded her to go fetch a kitten for me to hold.

The rest of the night was surreal, as I attempted to serve customers while cradling a kitten that had curled up in the palm of my hand and fallen asleep.

His name is Wally, and he was found alone on the street. He's about two and a half weeks old, and I was the fourth person to offer to kill his intended owner so I could keep him for myself.



It was about three in the morning when Logic Professor picked me up and we headed over to the woman's house to look at the other five kittens. I had texted him, asking if he wanted to do that (seeing as how she had invited me), and he replied that he was insulted I'd even had to ask. Someday I will get that man a kitten.

So we played with teeny-tiny kittens for about half an hour while they took turns being fed from a syringe. The other five are brothers and sisters; only Wally was found alone.

I WANT HIM FOR MY BOYFRIEND.


*UPDATED*

Some time ago I told Logic Professor that as soon as it was feasible, I would get him a basket full of kittens.
"It doesn't have to be a basket full of kittens. I just want one cat to love," he said sadly.

After he read this post, I reiterated that I would get him a basket full of kittens as soon as we had the space.
"I expect nothing less," he said.
"If it's Easter, I could put them in an Easter basket!" I said.
"Oh, you'll do it the day after Parsley dies, WHATEVER THE DAY," he replied.

It is times like these that I fear for Parsley's life.

Labels: Bunny vs. LoPro