duck-shaped pain

• Hoji-cha roasted green tea. Smokier flavor than expected, unaccompanied by the low-level headaches that occur when I drink too much normal green tea. I expect to find my limit soon, though.

• Snow without consequences. It snowed today, but it was that light sort of snow that melts right before it hits the ground. I got the experience of getting up, looking outside, seeing it snow and deciding, dammit, I'm going to stay in today, drink my hoji-cha and read the paper, but I won't have to shovel any walks or scrape any windshields because of it.

• Sneaking Pocky into the movies. It's about the perfect movie snack -- not messy, doesn't make a lot of noise when you eat it or open the box, easy to share. It's not in the least bit a surprise that Pocky isn't available in movie theaters, but in the perfect world, it would be. And it would be free. And they would have Men's Pocky

• Serious winter clearance sales, where I found many different pairs of socks for 25 cents each, a gray and red wool reversible skirt for $1.98, a chartreuse wool sweater for $3, among other things. And, they all fit.

• Listening to Giant Steps, eating oatmeal, and reading the paper on days when the only thing I am obligated to do is bathe.

• The big bag of Styrofoam packing peanuts that's sitting in the middle of the field across the street from the house. Don't know how it got there, but it's been there for about a week and a half now. The horses that live in the field were puzzled at first, but now seem to regard the packing material as one of them now.

• The elderly woman in the weird outlet store downtown who was trying on hats and who proceeded to tell everyone within hearing distance about her career as a hat model back in the years when people actually wore hats [1]. 1948, to be precise. Someone told her she had the perfect hat-shaped head, so she took a bus to New York on a whim and became a hat model. You don't see many people like her these days, ones that actually make hats look good on them.

• Getting the red curry stain out of my favorite white T-shirt. Doing enough laundry, including washing every sock and piece of underwear I could find, so that I won't have to do any more laundry for weeks and weeks.

• Going to the library. Finding a copy of James Kochalka's Monkey vs. Robot at our library. Trying to figure out exactly how someone in the library's acquisitions department found out about it and decided to purchase it.

Things that are not necessarily bad, but aren't giving me any sort of warm glowing feeling, either:

• The fact that Monkey vs. Robot is classified as a "Teen Novel."

• My town is getting its first Starbucks this month. Not sure why. It's in a weird guise, too -- they're opening up a little kiosk in a soon-to-open Albertsons located near the place I work. I don't think this spells doom, really. It's a pretty inconvenient spot and it's serving an area of town which is seriously coffee-deprived. Much like the aforementioned library acquisitions department, I just draw amusement from trying to imagine the thought process behind the decision to locate a Starbucks here, The Town That Mill Tailings Built. Oh well. [2]

• A cup of clam chowder with a grand total of two clams in it.

• Black bean soup which tastes more like celery than anything else.

• The local video store not having a copy of Tampopo.

• Overhearing two girls compare the net worth of their respective boyfriends, tortilla chip aisle at Safeway. Note: "net worth" is relative here. One of them had 150 CDs, barely beating out the other boyfriend with his measly 130. I have them both beaten, but I was too interested in the Salsa Reds (and too polite) to point that out.

• Having to go into work three hours earlier than normal all next week.

• Finishing my profile, which caused a lot of inner meta-discussion re: favorite bands and all. I actually do have quite a few other favorite journals, they're just not there for various reasons.

• The coupons in the new phone book. A useful idea in theory, but not when every single one is for discounted carpet cleaning. Not a pizza or oil change coupon in the bunch.

Just plain evil:

• Going to the Asian grocery store to pick up some more coconut milk and running into The Most Irritating Woman Ever (For This Week). She's an Asian food novice -- not normally a problem, except that she feels compelled to pick up every single item in the store and exclaim, "What the hell is this? How does anyone eat it." It's not like she was looking at natto or dried squid, rather she was set off by pretty normal items, like sesame oil. She was upset because they didn't have something she referred to as "beginner's chopsticks." Apparently, these are plastic chopsticks connected to each other at one end by some sort of spring mechanism so all one has to do to operate them is squeeze. Like chopsticks are Hard or something. They didn't have any in, and this sort of enraged her. Even worse, when she was talking to the guy who works there (who is not Asian -- he's the husband of the woman who runs the store, who is Chinese, I think), she kept saying things such as "those Orientals are so cute, I just want to pat them all on the head." Of course, after finding that there were no un-chopsticks to be found, she went sort of ballistic: "God, why can't Those People eat like real people do? Don't they know how stupid they look? I don't think I'd ever be able to go over to one of those countries over there -- I think I'd get sick just watching Those People eat. Anyway, I don't eat dog."

  Some people really suck.

[1] Looking back at pictures of clothing at the time, the people always look so sharp in their hats. I would have tried to go along, but I would have secretly been in hell, since I have too much hair and too big a head to successfully wear hats. I can put one on, but it will just sit there, perched on the top of my head until the slightest of breezes or movements on my part set it free.

[2] Interesting, sort of: the spellchecker on my less-than-a-month-old copy of Word 2000 recognizes "Starbucks" but not "kiosk."

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