55minutes

radiohead is screaming in my ear, blocking out the muzak from the cafe i am sitting in. inRainbows is one of my favorite albums. i am counting down the last hour before i have to deal with monday afternoon airspace. mondays are filled with airspace. i was Given Luck today. i adored this past weekend, my boyfriend & i went to one of my favorite parks in the rain yesterday; empty. rain makes people stay indoors. i don’t mind the rain, of course i wear a hat. i wouldn’t be caught with an umbrella. a few years back i dated a guy he always carried his golfing umbrella, something i found lame and embarrassing.

i haven’t used an umbrella in years, if it’s raining i just wear my fleece jacket or borrow my boyfriends jackets if i don’t have my own. i love rain, because it’s not sleet, or ice it’s just rain. spending twenty years on the right coast makes me not miss sleet or black ice. i can drive & find black ice in the mountains outside of the city, something going to the passes are not worth doing. this past winter we went snowshoeing, something i really like because it doesn’t cost a bundle to shoe up & go.

seattle is having a boom in falling house prices & condos being built all over the place. what i find sad is that old historic buildings are shredded for air tight pricey small apartments that retail on the housing market as a condo. of course they are made overnight, exposed to all the conditions imaginable, then the outside walls are added after the future rot dries. in my boyfriends part of the city a few McCondos where being built, dirty construction company managed to put the windows in before it left the site. now, they are just a eyesore for the neighborhood that is full of mixed houses in all kind of shape.

my favorite part of the city has been turned into condos that are built overnight and placed on the market for anything from the low 200,000 to half a million or more. for fancy steel & ikea designed kitchens i would rather have a house with a yard. something the condo lovers would never consider. i grew up with grass surrounding my parents houses, we always had a swamp near by. made summer mosquitoes a Blast. i don’t miss the humidity of an eastcoast summer, i’d rather take the dry heat that seattle gets every summer for a few weeks. but i will pass on the trend of buying an apartment that is called a condo & was sitting out during rain & seasonal weather then made airtight. NoThanks. i did few years of habitat for humanity-& because of that i can spot a shoddy job from an eyesore away.

till next time boycott the mermaid.

roasting

i am sitting in a newly designed, sheen, coffee shop that stands where Hines Coffee once was. Hines Coffee is legendary, a place i learned about coffee, roasting, espresso & that there is a Difference. now, it appears the Mermaid is copying what the small stores have been doing for years in seattle. making one drip choice a day, roasting in its stores; i found the news unsettling when one of the local papers made it a front page story.

roasting in a store does create an ambiance, coffee dust goes everywhere-something i learned when i would sit with my laptop on a fugly green couch at Hines. i enjoyed the roasting days because i would smell of roasted coffee from my head to my toes. the dust & the smell clung to my clothes. i enjoyed listening to the sound of the grind & the beans roasting. roasting is a loud process-i would rarely ever hear my cell phone when i was sitting in Hines on roasting days. i learned after a while that showering after being there was more useful that doing it before hand.

i enjoy small coffee houses, for me sitting @ a place that has more than 3places in seattle is embarking on a chain mentality but if the coffee is consistent i tend to go back. the Mermaid concept is over wrought with copying this small coffee house feel. their new strategy is much like if a 5th avenue designer decided to go back to garage sales everyday with their thousand dollar gowns & apparel-that won’t happen. why does the Mermaid want to revamp itself into a neighborhood coffee house when it’s a global conglomerate that sits & competes with itself on street corners in NYC??

i heard that several hundred locations have been closed due to lack of sales, Not a Shocker. i am such a die hard small coffee drinker that i won’t go into their location @ pike’s place market. Why. because they have stripped the store of how it used to look like, modernized the location. being Mermaids original location Why would shultz take away from how the place looked. i enjoy flagship stores because they are not changed into something else, they have a feel of how the original concept felt like.

revamping several domestic stores with expensive drip machines& now come included with coffee dust doesn’t make much sense. Mermaid prices have always been to high & their service has been lackluster for the last decade. changing the concept into What the small places that i frequent won’t make me a new customer. i tend to only pay close to $3 for my 80z latte. supersizing coffee is gross-something i am sure the Mermaid will still keep doing even with its new Image.

i am grateful for Hines, teaching me how coffee Truly is & there has been no place like like it. Not anywhere. i am partial to Vivace has a concept of exceptional quality that only comes from running 3 locations. the service, the taste & the aroma can’t be beat. you won’t see me clutching a Mermaid cup unless i am sitting for hours at Ohare& am trapped into drinking the only thing there is. Mermaid crap that will cost me more than small, yummy tasting lattes i enjoy the new sheen looking place, that took the place Hines once occupied. i still miss that Fugly green couch & coffee dust in my hair. i always will.

beingPresent

being present has been one of the hardest things in my life. what does it mean, that i feel whatever is going on & either find a solution or figure out if i am triggered. triggers can come from random behavior, thinking too much about a topic/situation rather than letting it play out making my decision after the fact. this is my third time writing this entry, the first to felt to personal & too deep. since, i have been diagnosed my life has changed. living with a mental illness is hard, each day is a new learning curve.i feel like i am in driving school & re-learning how to drive, some turns come on suddenly & i have to react quickly to what is going on. other days i feel like i am still driving down routeOne where i grew up, cruising @ 35miles per hour. today is a good day.

i feel clear, my thoughts aren’t interrupted by triggers or random thoughts that don’t make sense. making sense of my situation is much like a jigsaw puzzle& i don’t know where the pieces are going to land. last summer i wrote a few entries using the words undercover singleton. looking back i wasn’t undercover but in my brain. i managed a few entries before i was hospitalized & looking back i wasn’t fully functioning i was spiraling.

my view was lopsided on an axis; common for people with my mental illness. i developed fear& began manufacturing my life based on my phone. i was in my own world, literally. situation that i didn’t understand i made into something else, that was not real. i walked for several hours with no destination& i didn’t know where to go or Why i was walking. i spiraled sober; in the end i ended up on a friends porch where i continued to spiral- extending into the next day; when the police where called. i was brutally mishandled by local police department who apparently view the mental ill as people they can mistreat& dump in the hospital i ended up in.

i was held in the hospital & injected with gawd knows what drugs that did me very little. when i finally got the court ordered hospital i was in for 3 weeks-i had barely eaten for 2 days. i continued to get shots of drugs till i began taking them an attending the mandatory groups that also allowed me to get the right to be outside& to check my email. i didn’t have a pillow, the institution treated pillows as if they where made of gold & wasn’t in there long enough to get one. instead i got blankets. i was camping for 3weeks. it’s a hospital that the city uses to dump the mentally ill till they feel like dealing with them. the conditions where one of the worst i have ever seen.

i was Lucky that i stabilized in 3weeks, rather than being held for 90days. Lucky. Lucky. the day i left i was given tokens of encouragement from staff. within a week i was in a homeless shelter where i spent 6weeks last summer. i hit bottomHowever, i was able to find a solution & found a transitionalHousing. my new goal is to Never end up where i was last summer for the rest of my life. being Present has its moments;looking @ myself climbing a mountain that is my mental illness. some days the slope is too steep & i have to take a break look around& seeing how far i have come. be Present with myself no matter how hard it may Be. life always throws curve balls; it’s all in how you angle the bat.

—–>support local coffee. friends don’t let friends drink the mermaid.