Aug
21
A seemingly small thing I really miss is sitting in coffee shops. Not for the coffee itself, there are plenty of drive-through options, but for the ability to take my laptop and for a brief period enjoy a work environment that is not, you know, my living room couch.
I never thought I could be one of those coffeehouse writers because I am highly distracted by Things Happening Around Me, but I found that most places have a sort of ambient bustle and hum that is oddly pleasant. Some places are better than others (high-traffic Starbucks with lots of loud impatient-seeming people: not great; lower-volume indie cafe with people lingering over their freshly-baked goods: ideal), but they all offered a break from being isolated at home along with a boost of caffeine-fueled productivity.
All right, I just told myself I wasn’t going to always write-whine about pandemic boo-hoos, so I will segue to a related topic: the caffè breve. I am about to share something you cannot unknow, so if you have never ordered this drink, I am very sorry, but your life is about to get better/worse, depending on how you feel about guzzling a LOT of fat on the reg.
A breve is made with half-and-half instead of milk, and the only reason I even know this is because pretty much all of last summer I kept ordering a latte from a local-ish chain called the “Golden Eagle,” which has caramel and vanilla syrup, and even though I always got the sugar-free version I was like WHAT UNHOLY BLACK MAGIC MAKES THIS ICED BEVERAGE SO STUPIDLY DELICIOUS. Turns out it’s because the Golden Eagle is a breve, not a latte, and upon much experimenting since then I have learned that a giant cup of half-and-half is fucking amazing no matter what added-flavor shenanigans you foist upon it.
There, let’s call this a pandemic hot tip: get the breve. Seriously. Everything is awful and exhausting and heavy cream probably can’t solve everything but we can’t know for sure unless we try.
Aug
19
John and I were talking about how pandemic life really now has the post-911 feel of irrevocable cultural change, most evident in all the regulations that are slowly transforming from Brand New and Awful to Still Mostly Awful But Increasingly Familiar. As much as it used to feel impossible to imagine a world where everyone is always masked, it’s starting to feel quite difficult to imagine a time when none of this is still necessary (or if, in some cases, not a requirement we can collectively agree is necessary, at least still very much required).
The depressing truth is that when people talk about the “year of the pandemic” I find myself thinking that a year sounds HUGELY optimistic and frankly pretty unrealistic in every way.
Even assuming there is some sort of miraculous warp-speed vaccine (that people aren’t too paranoid to take), it seems to me that some things — masks on planes, maybe — are going to be here to stay. Sort of like how we all just automatically peel off our shoes in the security line and shuffle into a device that scans us from head to toe and then get patted down by a bored TSA agent if we draw the unlucky straw, we will barely remember a time when none of that was part of the flying experience.
The mask-wearing is a thing I truly dislike in every possible way but I can at least agree that unless told otherwise by trustworthy science-based sources it is a necessary evil. I will grumpily mask up as long as it takes, although I will never stop questioning the point of at least 50% of the freshly-installed plexiglass dividers out there.
The smartest-seeming ones I’ve seen are at grocery stores, where the POS situation is limited to a specific area, but there are so many that are just sort of … randomly placed? I was at Best Buy recently and the cashier station had this huge barrier that wasn’t even remotely in front of where the actual customer/clerk interaction happens. I guess the good news is that people in the plexiglass business are probably doing better than most other industries right about now, but jeez, it sure doesn’t seem like it should be that hard to look at where the payment transaction takes place and slap up the sneeze shield there.
Well. If there’s one thing I’m sick and tired of even more than living in an actual no-shit pandemic, it’s talking about the fucking pandemic. I want to go to a movie, I want to go see my mom and aunt without worrying about killing them, I want school to not be a thorny mess of terrible choices for every single parent, I want essential workers to at least be paid essential wages if they’re going to be the ones in the most danger, I want my kids to hang out with their friends, I want us all to go back to life before March of 2020, I want to talk about something ELSE.
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