Month: June 2014

The No-Starbucks Chronicles

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

On May 14, 2014, something tragic happened: the Starbucks near my office that I went to on a daily basis closed down.  For renovations, but the point remains that my daily coffee ritual was derailed completely by this development.

Since then, it’s been a daily challenge in trying to find a suitable replacement to my need for caffeine, and I gone from energy drinks, K-cups, to other places’ coffees.  The Starbucks is tentatively scheduled to be open again in July, although I’m not going to hold my breath.

The following was my daily chronicling of what I drank each day instead of Starbucks, and in a few rare instances, I got some reprieve:

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When feminism ruins good

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There’s a movie coming out this week called The Fault in Our Stars.  A brief synopsis is that it’s the story of a teenage girl (Hazel) with a terminal illness who meets a teenage boy (Augustus) at a support group who immediately takes a liking to her, despite the fact that Hazel feels insecure with herself due to her cancer and the fact that she has to always carry an oxygen tank around with her everywhere as a result.  As their relationship blossoms, Hazel is reluctant to fully let Augustus into her world, because she feels that as she is terminally ill, she doesn’t want to burden anyone with the pain of her eventual death.  Undeterred, Augustus pursues her heart, because pain is supposedly inevitable, and there’s no sense in trying to avoid it at the cost of living your life.

In other words, it’s a heartfelt romantic plot that is just about guaranteed to make the vast majority of viewers cry.  It’s also based on a true story, which makes it all the more soulful and beautiful in a sense.  But for all intents and purposes, it has the makings of a good movie that will undoubtedly make people feel sadness, but the overlaying message will be one that of happiness.

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The Racial Map

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Source: based on 2010 census data, an interactive map was created that displays a dot for every single person that participated, which is color-coded to what they entered as their ethnicity.  The result is what is being called the most comprehensive racial map ever created.

I have to say that this thing is really cool to tinker around with.  I don’t hide the fact that my interest is often piqued at the topic of race; some of it happens to do with the fact that despite my American upbringing, my Korean heritage technically makes me a minority, and then there’s the fact that I live in Atlanta, where in spite of the general perceived progression of the rest of the world, is a place where the topic of race and inequality is still a topic on almost a daily basis.  The race card is still flung around here like Gambit credit cards, in a far-fetched stretch to incorporate this analogy.

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Oh, Georgia vol. 77

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Part of my morning routine is reading the local news.  Yeah, I know the world is full of enthralling stories on a daily basis, but the AM hours are a time in which the days are young, so why should I expand the wings so early in the morn, when there’s still so much time ahead of me?  Needless to say however, the local news is sometimes all that I need in order to find an impetus to write something.

And in days like today, sometimes I get a couple of things that catch my fancy, that aren’t necessarily enough to justify warranting an entire wall of text, but combined, make for a hearty post nonetheless.

Another day, another MARTA fight recorded – you know how people believe that as people grow up, they tend to leave certain behaviors behind, like judging people irrationally based on nothing more than physical differences?  Yeah, not so much in this particular case.

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League of Lobby, volume 3

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This one’s a pretty short transcript, because everyone was so ragey, but I still figured it could be salvaged into the third edition of the League of Lobby; where only the toughest of the tough emerge from the muck of the exalted classy Riot community, to talk all the smack they’d be afraid to say in-game, where the watchful eyes of Riot and their peers in the tribunal could actually see them. So they take their frustrations to the blind safety of the post-match lobby, where the stars (asterisks) really begin to fly.

Context: It’s One For All: Mirror Mode at this point (AKA every single player plays the same character) and in this particular game, everyone got Lux (a froo-froo girly weezard), which was actually what most of my friends and I had voted for. She’s typically of the mage ranks, so her basic strategy is to increase the strength of her magic spells, and nuke enemies into oblivion.

When the opposing team noticed that one of us was immediately foregoing offensive items, and going defensive, they decided to throw down the gauntlet, and declare that person (jen) a “try hard” for daring to use her brain to attempting to get the upper hand against five of the exact same opponent. Naturally, this puzzled us, as typically the point of a match is to utilize the concept of “strategy” and try and best your opponents. Regardless, we immediately questioned their illogical frustration at us attempting to strategize a winning tactic.

And figure that, our strategy worked, and we won the match. Naturally, they were exemplary sports, and wished us good game.

Just kidding, they, rather one of them, was pissed off. Welcome to the League of Lobby!

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Therapeutic writing

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Lately, I’ve been in some kind of a weird mood.  I can’t quite say that it’s one of those obnoxious bouts of depression or anything, because if that was truly the case, then nothing could make me feel momentarily good when good things happen, and that hasn’t been the case.  It’s just that lately, it seems like life is really odd feeling at the moment, and the more I try to work things out in my head, the more it seems like it’s not going to get any simpler any time soon, and that there’s a whole slew of changes and things on the horizon that seem kind of daunting and/or things I can’t yet get myself mentally prepared for yet.

There was a period of time last week, where I felt this monumental weight on my head, and I had this overwhelming desire to write something that I might have regretted had I posted it.  It’s hard to explain why I wanted to write it so bad, but in hindsight, I’m glad that I wasn’t so rash as to actually post it, because I think it might have been a little too personal, and frankly something I’d probably regret publishing to the interwebs.  But for all intents and purposes, there’s a word document that has all this ominous text on it, but I’m pretty sure it’ll never see the light of day.

The thing is that simply writing it out, even if I didn’t post it, alleviated me of that mental weight that I felt for some reason.  Although nobody except for me will probably ever read it, I have to say that it really felt good jotting these words down nonetheless.  I will have to remember such a tactic the next time I’m feeling mentally overwhelmed, and I’d implore others to explore this tactic, to see if it works for them.  To some capacity, I’m exercising it right now myself, because I feel like writing something, but am not intending on writing anything that I might regret posting.

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