For When I'm Dead and Famous

Abolitionist, President, Diarist 

If you're anything like me, and unless you're a nonhuman you are, your memory of your childhood gets fuzzier and fuzzier the older you get. There are people for whom this isn't a problem. Let's call them journalers or diary keepers or people who thinks it's not talking to yourself like a crazy person if you're writing it down instead of saying it aloud. I have never been one of these people; therefore, I can no longer say with any certainty how old I was when I received my first diary. I think some member of my family who thought they understood all little girls may have gotten me a pink one with a lock and key and flowery lined pages when I was somewhere between the ages of 2 and 17. I don't recall ever writing in it, preferring to instead spend my spare time playing Truth or Dare with the older kids on my street. I once dared a preteen guy named Brandon to pee in front of me, which he had no problem doing because back then I was thought to be, at best, completely sexless or, at worst, such a die hard tom boy that I may have, in fact, willed myself to grow my own boy junk. Anyway, Brandon held up his end of the bargain, but I was too shy to actually watch. This is why, when I'm dead and Jen or whoever is in charge of going through the personal effects of those who die all alone in this world is going through my things, they won't find a girly diary with a, "June 15, 1989--Today I saw a penis. Meh." entry.

     The first time I concretely remember getting a diary was at the end of the summer break between my 6th and 7th grade years. There was a gap of a few weeks between the time my elementary school started its fall term and when my new junior high went back in session. For those few weeks, I volunteered in the multi-handicapped classroom at what had been my elementary school. I volunteered with a teacher named Christa Sprinkel. I don't recall that we got to know each other terribly well, but that's perfectly logical given that my teenage angst bloomed early, and I wasn't very pleasant to be around. At the end of the last day of my six weeks of service, Mrs. Sprinkel presented me with a thank you gift. "Every young lady should have a place to record her thoughts," she told me as I opened the journal. The cover was designed to look like a cross section of a pink geode. The pages were gold leafed. The attached bookmark was pink satin. That bookmark is still safely nestled between pages 3 and 4. Out of the sense of guilt and obligation that I felt as a gift recipient, I gave writing in the journal a try. I've been an insomniac since birth, so one night (truly, it could have been any night) when my thoughts wouldn't turn themselves off, I sat up in bed, grabbed my new journal, and tried to write exactly what popped into my brain as it popped. This was a colossal failure. Eventually I started to feel silly, so I ripped the page out and threw it away. I realize at this point in my story that it's starting to sound as if there was something inside of me, something too horrible to let out, even in my own private journal. Perhaps I was coming to terms with the fact that I'd had a huge crush on Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer when I was in the 4th grade and how that coupled with the fact that I had, in fact, snuck a peek at Brandon's peeing penis (or did I?) had led me to realize that I was as gay as the day is long (that's 24 hours gay even during Daylight Saving Time) and I just couldn't bear to admit it to myself.  No, I think the destroyed journal entry went something like, "Oh my god, why can't I sleep? Why can I never sleep? I want to kill myself I'm so tired of being tired." So you can see that it really was a wasted page that deserved to be torn out and tossed aside. That was all the journaling I had in me for another sixteen years or so.

     One Christmas a few years ago, my best friends got me a journal. By this time I'd started writing semi regularly, so the blank page had become a whole different kind of terrifying to me than it was during those sleepless junior high school nights. This journal's a good one. It's brown with a black and orange plaid pattern and an orange elastic band to keep it closed. It's the perfect size. It feels good to hold. My friends even took some of the scary out of the journal for me by inscribing it with a very nice yet undeserved note about my writing ability. In fact, maybe this wasn't a journal after all. Maybe it was just something for me to have on hand--something more convenient than the back of an ATM receipt. It seems like the sort of thing a serious writer would carry around for when random musings try to burrow out of her skull, so I did. I carried this journal around in that other ultra important accessory of the super serious--the messenger bag. It was always with me. Thanks to my new it's-not-a-journal-journal attitude, I was occasionally able to scribble some words down in this bound stack of cocktail napkins. Since I now carried it with me everywhere, I found it was particularly useful in potentially awkward social situations. For the first week or so that I worked at the bank, I would sit in the lunch room and write furiously so that no one would think to talk to me. This sort of behavior has, in the past, helped people come to the understanding that I'm a standoffish bitch, but in reality, like a spider, I'm more afraid of you than you are of me. Eventually I got to the point where I wasn't afraid of my banking friends, so my plaid journal shield was no longer necessary. That's when I stopped writing in it regularly. I still have it, and it has far more content in it than any other journal I've ever tried to keep, but still...

     I suppose the biggest reason I haven't felt the need to keep a journal over the past 4 years is that I don't have any private thoughts. I have a girlfriend. We share a life. Every third conversation that goes on between the two of us starts with, "Remember the time...?" And we do. We remember the time. So why, you would ask if you knew to, did I go out and buy a fancy new leather journal yesterday? Well let me tell you. 

     I don't know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line I became the sort of person who likes to read biographies of both the auto and not-so-auto variety. I also like history books. And I've noticed something. Famous and important people keep journals. They always have. What do Patti Smith, Virginia Woolf, and Doogie Howser all have in common? They are/were diary keepers. 

     The tipping point for me was with the book I'm reading now, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. It's about the shooting and subsequent death (more than 2 months later) of James Garfield. The book itself is interesting. His shooting never would have happened today since the guy who shot him would have been on everyone's radar from moment one. Oh, and we actually employ people to protect our presidents these days unlike in 1881 (yes, even after Lincoln), but the thing that has had the most profound impact on me to this point in my reading is--dude wrote shit down. The book is chalk full of excerpts from Garfield's journal. So I got to thinking, if keeping a diary is good enough for the 20th president of the United States, then by god it's good enough for me. Also, I like the smell of leather. 

     Like I said earlier, I bought the journal yesterday. Not wanting to waste any time, I decided to draw further inspiration from Mr. Garfield before attempting my own entry. Included in the pages that I read yesterday was a brief note from Garfield's diary written on the day he unwittingly came into contact with the man who would, just a couple weeks later, shoot and kill him. After future assassin Charles Guiteau showed up at Garfield's church and made an ass of himself, Garfield commented that Guiteau was, "a dull young man, with a loud voice, trying to pound noise into the question." Pretty boring, right? Well not once you add the context. I mean, that dull young man is plotting to kill the very man who finds him boring. Sometimes I want to shoot people who find me boring too. (Shh Carrie. Save those kinds of comments for the diary.) As I read Garfield's thoughts I think, my god, I could be shot tomorrow leaving nothing behind but some Ikea furniture and a well stocked bar to help historians piece together the puzzle of my mind. 

     A woman's diary is sacred, and it's possible that I won't feel safe pouring out my deepest darkest thoughts and desires if I break the trust by relaying here what I wrote there nearly 24 hours ago, but I can leave you with my entry's closing line, because some thoughts are too important to be kept under lock and heart shaped key. The line is, "I'm giving this journaling thing another try so that one day T & S can know for sure that I loved eating fish sticks with them." Just wait 130 years and that shit's going to blow your mind.   

      

     

If You Really Want to Hear About It: In Defense of My Favorite Book

When I first turn to the first page of a book I'm starting, I get the same feeling I get when I cruise onto the highway at the beginning of a long road trip. The same feeling I get on the rare occasion I open the mailbox to find a real honest-to-god letter addressed to me. It's the feeling I get during that last hopeful moment right before I check lottery numbers. But it hasn't always been this way.
     When I was in the 4th grade I was in this gifted program, and our teacher assigned us a book report. We could read anything we wanted, but I'm pretty sure the implication was that we should read something a little more advanced than Beverly Cleary. I don't remember what the other kids in my class chose to read. Probably Proust or Faulker or something of the like, but that doesn't matter because, as far as I know, none of my classmates (wonderful people, all of them) are any closer to curing cancer than I am. I say this in the literal sense. As far as I know, my classmates and I are all doing well. Successful in our own ways. But as far as changing life as we know it goes, I haven't red about any of us on the front page of The Times, in celebration of our breakthroughs in time travel. I think I was 28 when I finally realized that my 4th grade book report didn't actually fucking matter. Anyway, the point is that while my peers were off reading The Sound and the Fury I decided I would read A Wrinkle in Time, a respectable enough intermediate level, Newbury Award winning book about whatever it is that that book is about. I couldn't tell you since I never actually read it. I'm sure that, 22 years later, I have this number completely wrong, but I seem to remember being on page 17 about 2 days before the report was due. My mother, my amazing, wonderful, future-writer-of-my-book-reports mother, said that maybe I could get away with doing a report on The Velveteen Rabbit. So what if it was only 40 pages and half of them were pictures? This book was a fucking classic. I trudged through, and, since the gifted program wasn't a graded class there wasn't a thing my teacher, Mrs. Baker, could do about it.
     Then, when I was 5th grade, I stupidly chose to read Hound of the Baskervilles for a book report. I say this move was stupid not because there is anything particularly wrong with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's third Sherlock Holmes novel. I haven't the first clue whether or not there's anything unappealing about the book, I didn't read it when I was 10, and I still haven't read it now that I'm 31. No, I say that my decision to read Hound of the Baskervilles for a 5th grade book report was stupid because, up until that point in my life, I'd never read anything more sophisticated than a 100 page, Matt Christopher basketball novel, so catapulting into the world of adult fiction was probably a little unrealistic. The night before the report was due, I had barely started the book. My mother, the aforementioned saint, chose to teach me a lesson about doing whatever is necessary to make sure your family is okay instead of a lesson about making sure you get your own shit done. She speed read my book, summarized it for me, then practically wrote the report herself.
     I'm not sure my mother knew what to do with me at this point. Everyone on her side of the family read a book or two a week, what the hell was wrong with me? If this is starting to sound like I'm leading up to a big reveal about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia, I'm really sorry to have to disappoint you. The truth is, I was probably just exceedingly lazy, and too into Designing Women and LA Law. You know, typical 10-year-old shit.
     Though my mom and I shared a love for Julia Sugarbaker's ability to cut anyone who messed with her fellow interior designers down to size, I did get the sense that she wouldn't have minded if I'd picked up a book every once in a while. She did everything she could think of to get me to read. We didn't have much money when I was growing up, but my mother never, not once, said no to me if I asked her to buy me a book. I'd watched the wonderful Wonderworks versions of The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe and Anne of Green Gables so many times that I had them memorized, so my mom bought me all 7 of the Narnia books and a beautiful, gold-leafed, illustrated version of Anne of Green Gables. I leafed through. I tossed aside. I went back to watching a coked up Drew Barrymore in the made for T.V. version of Babes in Toyland. Sure it came out when I was 5, but I had that shit on tape, and I would have rather watched it a 47th time than crack open Super Fudge. But this would soon change.

     Something started happening to me around the 6th grade. No, it wasn't boobs. I got those, and all the joy that goes along with them much earlier. For one thing, I had a reading teacher, Mr. Kenny Moore, who I actually liked, which I think helped me get to the point where I could get through a whole book if someone had a gun to my head. Mr. Moore made us keep a journal about the books we were reading. We handed these in weekly so that he could make sure we were actually doing what was expected of us. I remember reading a children's illustrated version of Robinson Crusoe and writing in my journal that sometimes I wished I could be stranded on an island. Mr. Moore jotted on comment in the margin, "Why?"

     This brings me to the major thing that started happening to me around the 6th grade. The thing that was way more profound than secondary sex organs. Depression Like, I had both melancholy and infinite sadness, before Billy Corgan ever even thought to shave his head. By the time I made it out of elementary school and into the 7th grade, I'd graduated from sort of passively wishing I could be on an island of my own to a full-blown, burning-tapered-candles-in-your-otherwise-dark-room-and-writing-poetry-about-corpse-souls-while-listening-to-Imagine-over-and-over-again-on-a-loop teenage angst. The last bit about John Lennon's Imagine is of particular importance. 

     Even though I was a devout atheist, and nonbeliever in heaven and (non-metaphorical corpse-like) souls, I had the silly little notion that I was John Lennon reincarnated. I had always loved the Beatles, but John was the individual mop head who had my heart, so I assumed, what with my being born less than a month after he was assassinated, that now, at least on a spiritual level, I had his heart too. Well, it was in the 7th grade, when my grungy angst was in bloom that I remembered something a kid named Jared said to me when were were still just 6th graders. He told me that the guy who killed John Lennon had done so because he'd read The Catcher in the Rye. Now, all I knew about the book was that I couldn't remember a time when there wasn't a copy of it in my house and that my mom liked it a lot, but since I was walking around with the victim's soul between my ears (or wherever souls are kept) I crept out of my room long enough to grab the iconic maroon and gold family copy. I read it. And fuck me, I loved it. I loved that book. I still love that book. The Catcher in the Rye is my favorite book, and even though it's a giant cliche, I'm not going to apologize for it. 

     The protagonist, Holden Caulfield, swears (sort of) right in the first line. The kid's a mess. He's locked up in a loony bin for Christ's sake. That scene where he's remembering talking to his sister Phoebe, and he tells her that his dream is to stand at the edge of a cliff that some kids are playing near and catch any kid that's about to go off? I think that's the first time I ever understood a metaphor. How could I not love this book? And where the hell was my Holden Caulfield to keep me from going off my cliff? 

     Look, I know that The Catcher in the Rye isn't the greatest book ever written. But I also know that, without that book, I'm still sitting on a couch watching Golden Girls reruns until my eyes bleed. You know what I did shortly after I read The Catcher in the Rye? I read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. Then I read a little Truman Capote, and some Orwell, and Aldous Huxley. Without The Catcher in the Rye, I never take all the literature classes I can fit into my schedule at community college in Dayton, and I never meet the professor who encourages me to transfer to Ohio State to get a BA and take some writing classes. Without The Catcher in the Rye, I never move to Columbus. I never meet any of the friends I have now. I never meet Jen. 

     So, you can ask me tomorrow, or you can ask me 50 years from now, and the answer will be the same. My favorite book is The Catcher in the Rye. What's yours? 

      

   
   
   
      

A Book is Worth 40,000 Words

I was on a real roll there for a while with my blog posts. Well where the hell have I been for the last month? Have I slipped back into the abyss of blogger slackerdom? How dare you suggest such a thing. Let me explain.

As most of you don't know (because, seriously, what's more boring than listening to someone talk about her New Year's resolutions?) at the start of 2011 I set a goal for myself of reading 26 books during the calendar year. To some people that probably sounds like a lot of reading. To the types of folks who are much faster readers than I, it probably sounds like I may as well have made the resolution to remember to breathe once every few seconds. For me, the only person who really matters as far as setting goals for me goes, I just wanted an achievable, realistic number. One book every two weeks or so. For a person with a job, and a genetic need to spend a few hours a week at the gym, and an unabashed willingness, if left unsupervised, to watch 25 hours of television a week, 26 books felt attainable. In the interest of full disclosure though, I am currently supervised for about 90% of my waking hours, and I really only watch about 3 hours of TV a week, most of which is Friends dvds; otherwise, I'd never have reached my goal. Oh, did I just bury the lead there? Yes, I just said I reached my goal of 26 books read in 2011. In fact, I got so into this whole, reading thing, that I couldn't stop myself and a read a few more. I'll admit, when I got to November and I realized I still had 6 books to read, I got a little twitchy. I put the blog on hold, but I filled a few pages in my little pocket notebook with blog ideas, so don't fear: there's more on the horizon. As soon as I figure out what in the hell I meant when I jotted down, "Jason Stark, Einstein hair," we'll be back in business.
     If you're the sort of person who's interested in what other people read, here's the list of my 2011 books.  Just to clarify, when I say "books" I mean those bound things with all the wonderful smelling pieces of paper with squiggly lines printed all over them. The ones you can hold spread open in both hands. The solid masses you can swat people with if they dare interrupt you right when you're getting to the best part. Books.

     Here's a simple breakdown of what kept my eyeballs and my brainball occupied this year:
          Fiction: 22
          Nonfiction: 8
          Male: 22
          Female: 8
          Memoir/Personal Essay: 6
          Science/History/Biography: 2
          Scandinavian Crime Fiction: 5

Rapeseed, rapeseed, my friend

We read a book for my book club that left such a bad taste in my mouth that I decided I desperately needed a literary pallet cleanser. I asked a friend if he could recommend a good mystery, and he pointed me to Scandinavian. I have no real explanation for how I ended up dedicating 1/6th of my reading efforts to Scandinavian crime fiction. They're good, but they're not that good. They were all sort of slow burns that took me longer to read than they should have given that the genre is supposed to compel you to keep going, just one more page, one more chapter, one more plot twist further. Three of the five were part of the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. The first I read of that series was Sidetracked, and once I figured out what in the hell rapeseed is (this book is full to the gills of rapeseed fields) I really enjoyed it.  Mankell is considered something of a rockstar of the genre. All I know about the man I learned from Wikipedia. He's married to Ingmar Bergman's daughter, and he hates Israel. But Wallander is damaged goods with a gruff exterior and a soft, hidden underbelly. How could you not want to spend a few hundred pages with him. If you liked The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I don't see why you wouldn't like the Wallander books too, especially since they aren't bookended by 100 dull, tedious-to-read pages at the beginning and end of the story.

I can't believe how few books by women I read this year. I should be ashamed of myself, and I am. Having said that, easily the two best books I read this year were written by women, so stick that in your pipe. My last read read of the year was Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. You may be familiar with her without even realizing it. Perhaps you went to see the movie, The Namesake, because it stars Kal Penn from the Harold and Kumar movies. I've never seen those movies, but I'm assuming he's Kumar. I hope that doesn't make me a racist. Anyway, my point is that Jhumpa Lahiri wrote the book that the movie The Namesake, starring the guy who played Kumar (or Harold?) in the stoner flicks. Lahiri has also won a little thing called the Pulizter Prize for her first collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Sorry, I've gotten off the very important track of talking about how good Unaccustomed Earth is. It's really good. If you you enjoy character driven fiction, then it's really really good. I'd say more, but I have 20-something more books to get through, and I've already gone on and on about Kal Penn. Suffice it to say, for now, that Unaccustomed Earth might have been my favorite book of the year. Or it could just be that it's the one I read most recently. Who can say?
     Either my second favorite book of the year, or my favorite book that happens to be less fresh in my mind than Unaccustomed Earth was Karen Russell's, Swamplandia!. That exclamation point is part of the title. I don't just throw those around willy-nilly. This book was fantastic! The most common way that I've described it unsolicitedly is to say that it's sort of like a The Smiths song. It's kind of fun and poppy, and then you start to pay attention to the lyrics and you realize he's singing about his girlfriend who is in a fucking coma. That's not poppy. Well the setting and the language in Swamplandia! gave me a similar feeling. What a charmingly eccentric family of alligator wrestlers dressed up as Native Americans, and selling worthless souvenirs to the mainlanders they disdain. Oh wait--the mother's died, the father has no idea what in the hell he's doing, and the protagonist has just wandered off into the swamp with a gypsy. I can see how this story might not be for everyone, so if you're on the fence, you might leaf through Russell's earlier collection of stories, St. Luce'y Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. There's a story in there called, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator," that Swamplandia! is based on.

Another common theme for me this year was reading nonfiction by people who are funny who have strong voices that I admire. If you want to be a person who writes, you should also be a person who reads. It's a wonderful way to hone your craft. It's also a wonderful way to spend 2 months not writing while still feeling self-righteous about the fact that you're working on something that you're obnoxiously snobbish enough to call, "your craft." The two best books that feel into this category this year were, Half Empty, by David Rakoff and, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, by Steve Martin.
     If you've never read David Rakoff, I'd like to make a couple recommendations. First, start with one of his other books. Fraud, for example. Second, even if you're not the sort of person to do this, get the book on cd. David Rakoff is one of those people who's actual spoken voice adds something to what you're reading. If you've ever listened to David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell read their own work, you know what I'm talking about. I'm not suggesting that Half Empty isn't as good as his other books, I'm just suggesting that, since this one is largely about his experiences with his own cancer, you might want to get to know that guy first. He's dry and snarky and wonderful and I don't understand why my girlfriend, who read this book in 2 days and claimed to love it only gave it 3 stars on goodreads. Jen?
     Another book that Jen only gave 3 stars, though she read it in a day, couldn't put it down, in fact, Steve Martin's, Born Standing Up, gives the best glimpse of what it must be like to slog through the early years of being a live performer or standup comic, something it's never occurred to me to try, but which I found fascinating nonetheless. Having said that, I have always been madly in love with Steve Martin, so maybe I'm not a reliable source as far as this one goes. If a book of the same theme had been written by, say, Andrew Dice Clay, I wouldn't have picked it up with rubber gloves.

I'm going to be honest with you, dear reader, I'm running out of battery power on this machine. I'm out of town, and I have no charger with me. It's the last day of the year, and I swore I would get this posted before the year was over. I'm going to finish this one up quick and dirty.
     Book 26 almost killed me, and it took a year of on and off reading to get through. Jon Meacham's, American Lion, is quite good, and if you had access to unlimited amounts of Adderral or Cocaine, you could probably get through it in fewer than 9 disjointed months. I'm sure it was me. The book won the Pulitzer, and it was about a president whom I've always found fascinating. I would recommend it to anyone looking for an American History or American politics suggestion. Really, it was me, not the book.

I just scanned through the rest of the books I read in 2011, and, yeah, I think I'm good. I don't feel compelled to mention any of the others here. I did mention another of my books in a previous post. Please do check out the rest for yourself though. If you see anything you'd like to know about, you know where to find me.

2012--35 book, 52 blog posts. Hold me to it.
   

God's Love: The Case for "Working" from Work

Photo from: http://foodiewanderings.blogspot.com/2010/09/coffee-art-or-heart.html

The unfortunate thing about the location of the office where I work is that it's not close to any good coffee shops. Since Jen and I only have one car, one of the things I spend a lot of time doing is driving around looking for places where I can work. I could just go home, but once you factor in drive time, I often lose an hour of potentially productive work time, so I'll often try to stay close to the office.
     Now, when I say I'm looking for places to "work," I mean I'm looking for places where I can read things that will make me feel smarter and write things that will make me seem dumber (like this sentence). Here's a bit of free advice for you. If you have dreams of one day being respected for doing something that is, in all reality, completely frivolous and technically unnecessary for human survival, you can practice that dream during your free time and call it "work." You don't even have to use air quotes when you talk about it. People will think you're hot shit. And if you're wondering where the reading part fits into the whole, "work" myth, then you've obviously never taken a writing class. Spending four years in college being told by professors that, in order to hone your craft, you not only have to write every day, but you also have to read every day is worth the price of admission, especially at today's historically low interest rates.
     It only took me two months of driving around for an hour at a time (that same hour I would have lost by just going home) before finally giving up and settling for places I know about that are nowhere near the office before I finally got wise and remembered that I carry the world around with me at all times. A phone is only as smart as the person whose pocket it lives in. I have three different apps that can figure out where my phone is (as in globally, not just in my pocket) and point me toward the closest coffee shops.
     When my phone told me that there is a place called Heavenly Cup right down the street from the office, I thought nothing of it. People call things "heavenly" all the time. It's secular euphemism at this point. "Please, try some of this corned beef sandwich; it's heavenly." "The full-release massage I got on vacation in Thailand was absolutely heavenly." You get what I'm saying.
     After I payed for my chai and grabbed a window seat from which to work, I opened up my laptop and looked for Heavenly Cup's wireless network. There were several password protected networks listed, but I was expecting to see something like, "Heavenly Cup (Free)." There was nothing like that in my list of available networks though. In fact, the only free and open network that was listed was one called "God's Love." I am, at times, not bright. My first thought, I swear to God, was, huh, is there a church around here or something? To say that I have an aversion to The Lord (do you capitalize "The" when referencing The Lord? I can never remember. Is it like The Godfather? The Sting? The Terminator?) would be going too far. I have an aversion to cancer, and carrots, and people with the nickname "Cooter," but it's not actually possible to have an aversion to something you don't believe in. The reality of the situation is that, unless I'm directly confronted with Him, I don't give Him much thought at all. Hence the fact that, despite the name of the wireless network I'd just connected to, despite the fact that every customer who walked into the coffee shop while I was there somehow managed to work talk of the previous Sunday's church service into their conversation, despite the name of the goddamn coffee shop, I didn't notice the fucking halo hovering over the "u" in "cup" until I'd been sitting there staring at the sign hanging below the register for an hour.
     It's cool. It's not like I stood up and left as soon as I realized that I was in Christ's Coffee House. The woman who owns the place was very friendly (that's how they get you), and the men who kept coming downstairs from the church offices upstairs (the talk of Sunday's service finally made sense when I noticed that all the customers coming from upstairs were wearing matching polo shirts complete with embroidered crosses) seemed to know everyone and even offered to help some guy with his algebra homework. From what I could tell, everyone who walked into the place knew everyone else who was there. Folks came in and left a couple minutes later with their preferred drinks without ever having to order. The proprietor would sit at a table with her regulars and chat with them between customers. That sort of atmosphere is nice. It's also the sort of thing that will put you out of business, which is what I assume is happening with this shop since every patron who crossed the Heavenly Cup threshold asked the owner, "Have you found a buyer yet?"
     "Maybe if I won the lottery, I could afford to take one of the offers I've gotten. Of course, if I won the lottery, I wouldn't have to sell it in the first place." At this point, I imagine someone suggested that she pray on the situation, but I was too busy packing up my shit to notice. It wasn't that I wanted to leave. It was a nice enough place to work. It wasn't dirtier than any other coffee shop; after all, I bet even the cleanliest baristas find spent coffee grounds in the strangest places after an 8 hour shift. Sure, it was small. There were only 4 small tables, but I had found a seat right away. Yeah, it seemed to be a heavenly, I mean heavily Christian establishment, but the owner was very friendly.  No, I had to leave because, in spite of its values driven charm, Heaven's Cup was missing one vital ingredient. Power outlets within reach of the tables. As a wireless network, God's Love is nearly as omniscient and omnipotent as its namesake. God's Love can give you the latest world news, resurrect our fallen heroes, and grant access to porn. What God's Love can't do is power my laptop for more than 90 minutes. Off to greener pastures I went.
     I still had more than an hour before I had to be at work. All out of ideas, I gave up and headed to the office to do a bit more "work" before work. It turns out that's where I'm most productive anyway.