Dark Side of the Joon

I’ve kept my Tumblr pretty low key. Every once in a while I consider sharing it more with my friends of family but I end up being more and more happy that I haven’t. It’s a nice place to vent about pretty much everything and not have to worry about it.

I’m going to go ahead and take advantage of that right now. I know that no one that lives anywhere near me reads this, so I don’t have to worry that it will be seen as me “fishing” for anything. I just need to get this out of my head and my heart because it’s really bothering me and I don’t want to be thinking about it anymore. So here we go.

I don’t really have any friends. My “closest” friend is actually someone that lives 2 states over. I don’t really make friends because I’m this weird, freakish anomaly that doesn’t fit in anywhere.

I’m a single mom, so the family chicks don’t want to hang out with me. They’re husband feels like the 3rd wheel and I don’t always have my kids to make playdates with, or someone to watch my kids when I do have them.  The single chicks don’t want to hang out with me because we have nothing in common at all - my life is totally wrapped up in my kids and I’m always busy and exhausted. 

I’m kinda poor, so the middle and upper class people feel weird around me. I can’t talk to them about my college days, or my new car, and I don’t throw big dinner parties or have a nanny and I can’t afford to go on long weekends with them to the lake or go shopping with them all the time. My purse isn’t made by Coach.

I’m not really prone to acting poor either though, so I don’t do what so many of the other poor, single moms do. I don’t smoke weed, or watch Nascar, or drink to my head at dive bars, or watch every episode of Teen Mom or whatever. I don’t dig on the cycle of dramatic relationships. 

I don’t eat Quinoa, I don’t have a gluten allergy. I don’t know. I’m just a fucking weirdo I guess. When I do like people, they don’t seem to like me.

Most of the time I’m okay with this. I don’t have time to be super social anyway, so most of my social life is on Twitter, Facebook, email or whathaveyou anyway. i can be pretty independent, but I try to at least keep in touch. I ask people about their lives, their kids, their jobs. I reach out.

I’m pregnant and no one is throwing me a baby shower. Lots of people ask to be invited. They tell me to make sure to register for gifts. But none of them really cares enough or likes me enough to actually throw the damn thing. You don’t throw yourself a baby shower, that’s pathetic and trashy. It’s not really even about the gifts - though it will be sad to not have the friends around me cooing and gushing about the adorable outfits. What’s sad is we’re going to have a baby and no one is going to celebrate that with us. No one cares enough. Not even MY MOM. (Disclaimer: my mom never does any of that shit.) 

I guess it just feels lonely. Just one more reminder that I’m somehow weird and broken. 

“It’s always darkest before the dawn.”

It’s a cliche, of course, but one we use so often because it gives hope when life seems its bleakest. They’re words to speak to someone when you have no idea what else to say to them, when you can’t think of anything that might give them even an ounce of comfort in their pain. Like all cliches, though, it is often rooted in some truth. The repetition of the words makes them trite, but it doesn’t always make them false. 

At this time last year I was home alone, just as I am now. My kids were with their dad for the long Memorial Day weekend and while many a single mom might look forward to the peace and relaxation of that time alone, I wasn’t. I was laying in the wreckage of another relationship gone to hell and I hadn’t yet gained my footing. A weekend alone sounded like a demonic form of torture. I called my friends, I called my family, grasping at the hope that I could make some plans and distract myself from the deafening quietness of the life that had been left behind. As though to let me know how truly alone I really was, the universe would give me no simple comfort of companionship. I was to ride it out on my own. Not a single person would come to my side, not one.

And so the silence broke upon me and for 4 days I fought my demons alone. I can’t describe the sounds I made as I cried until I thought I might vomit. I can’t explain to you how that emptiness, that hollowness, in my chest made me ache until I thought my heart might stop altogether. I clung to the blankets on my bed like they were a life preserver and I was caught in a storm. The grief and the loneliness came to me in crushing waves that I still can’t fully comprehend surviving. A pinpoint of light kept me alive then, as old ghosts caused me to claw at my wrists and pull at my hair in feeble attempts to replace the emotional anguish with a physical one: I have two babies, I reminded myself. They need their mommy whole. I have two babies. I have two babies. I have two babies. 

I came out the other side of that weekend fragile, and brittle, but alive. Sometimes that’s all we can ask for, just to still be breathing. 

It was as dark as it was to me then because in my mind it wasn’t just a break up. Sure, I had loved the man that left and I mourned that. But more so, I mourned my life. Look at me. Look at what an utter failure my life had become. ANOTHER failed relationship. ANOTHER failure to my kids. And from there, all of my other failings boiled to the top as well: my pathetic career, my pathetic attempts at being a writer, my shitty car, my shitty house, how fucking poor I was. The break up spiraled me into an absolute pit of self-hatred. I was pathetic, disgusting, unlovable. I was a joke. Everything I saw was darkness.

If I had known what I would stumble upon less than two months later, I might have held my head a little higher. It’s been only a year since that bleak weekend, but to that fragile, brittle girl my life would be unrecognizable. I’m 5 months pregnant, I’m 3 months away from being married, my children and I are loved, tended to and adored. I have hope. Looking back on it, when I met Chris in July it was just exactly what that cliche old saying insisted. He broke upon my darkness like the dawn. And it doesn’t feel trite to me at all, it feels relieving.

This weekend I’m alone again. My kids are with their dad and my fiance is 5,000 miles away, but it’s okay. I’m alone, but not lonely. I can feel the warmth of the sun on my face now, and it feels good. 

I have to vent here for a minute about a SERIOUS hole in the already terrible privacy controls over at Facebook that I don’t think most people are even aware of.

As you know, Facebook has added a new feature; the “ticker”. It’s that small, ever scrolling bar in the upper right hand corner of your newsfeed that shows you what your friends are currently up to: what they’re listening to, playing, and most importantly - what they’re clicking like and commenting on. Why is that the most important thing? Because that’s where that little ticker is SCREWING YOU OVER.

I’m careful with my privacy. I use my Facebook page to share photos of my kids with my friends and family, but I don’t want those pictures accessible to people I don’t know. I’m protective of them. I’m also not a big fan of the “lurking” and “stalking” that seems to have become so socially okay in the last 5 years or so. I don’t want my exes watching my every move, scouring through photos of me with my fiance, or out on the beach on vacation. I don’t want my fiance’s exes to have access to pictures of me or my kids either. I’ll be blunt - not all of either of our exes are super stable people in general. I don’t want my exes’ new women to be all up in my shizz either. You’re getting my drift here, right - I like my privacy. I value it and I do kind of a lot to protect it. Which is why I had it locked up like Fort Knox. A stranger would see my Facebook profile, my public page, as nothing but a cover shot for my timeline, my current profile picture, and my hometown. That’s it. Nothing is set to be shown to the public, and more relevantly to this conversation, none of it is set to be shown to “Friends of Friends”.

I have a lot of reasons for this. One of which is that I’m friends with some people from work, but very purposefully not my boss. My boss is friends with them though, so that won’t work. Also, I have friends that are mutual friends with some of my exes, including recent exes as well as my ex-husband. I don’t want to share with them either. So everything is firmly set to “Friends Only”.

Turns out, though, that Facebook gave you that option, but it’s a total damn farce. Complete fabrication. 

That little ticker I mentioned? Let me walk you through an example:

I post a photo of me and my fiance on a sunny day. Yay, isn’t it cute! My Gramma clicks like, my friend Michelle comments “Awwww”. Everyone’s happy. Until my friend Sarah clicks like on it. Sarah is friends with Tom, my ex boyfriend. Because they’re friends, when Sarah clicks like it shows up on Tom’s ticker. Tom’s ticker tells him “Sarah liked Joon’s photo.” Tom clicks on this, and he can see a full version of my photo, my comment/description, who I tagged, anything I’ve listed about where/when it was taken, and all of the likes and comments it’s received thus far. 

Despite the fact I’ve set that photo to Friends Only, and Tom is not on my friends list, Tom has access to my photo. Anytime Sarah, or any of our mutual friends, is active on any of my posts, Tom has access to them. 

I’m sorry, Facebook, but that’s MESSED. UP. 

So what are my options? My privacy settings are obviously useless. Here’s what you can do:

You can protect your friends from this happening to them by going to each and every one of their pages individually, and unsubscribing from their feed. Of course, this also makes it so you can’t see any of their activity in your newsfeed, and will only know if they post something if you manually go to their timeline. Super convenient, right? I for one have about 90 friends, and have friends whose lists number in the several hundreds. It’s just not possible.

To protect yourself? There’s nothing you can do but ask your friends to do to you what I’ve described above: Ask them to go to your page, and unsubscribe from your feed. Of course, this makes the whole premise of Facebook totally pointless. Now I’ll be posting photos and status messages but no one will see them unless they manually go to my timeline. That’s asinine. 

No, this is a terribly easy fix for Facebook to make, but an almost hopeless one for us. My options are to stop posting altogether, only post things I am okay with having be at least semi-public, unfriend everyone that is friends with my exes or my boss, or move to an entirely different social network (which sounds better and better by the minute) with a better, more controllable privacy policy, like Google+.

Shame on you, Facebook. I hope this lawsuit nails your ass to the wall. It was bad enough when you were raiding my emails and contacts without my permission to make your ads more customized to me, but this is a total slap in the face. To pretend that I have options, and then disregard my choices, is reckless at best and dangerous at worst. Boooo. And the fact that you’ve known about this problem for over 6 months and don’t even seem to see it as a problem (let alone have it on the radar to alter this in anyway) is irresponsible. Shaaaaame.

K, that was more than a minute. BUT IT WAS IMPORTANT.

Dear Starbucks,

Consider this a precursor to a Dear John letter that has been a long time in coming. This is my last begging, pleading, desperate hope that you’ll get your shit together so we can still have the long, loving relationship we’ve shared over the last 14 years.

I’m thinking about leaving you.

I’m just not happy anymore. You see, there’s so much I still love about you. The same things I loved about you when I stepped into that first Starbucks location 14 years ago with a job application and a dream. You don’t take the cheap, easy ground.  You try to use the best ingredients, made the best way, even if the production is more expensive. You fight for fair trade in the countries you get your coffee from, so that those places are better for having worked with you, and the people that live there have better lives. You do your best to maintain some semblance of environmental sustainability, to leave this earth as good a place as when your corporation found it. Those are noble attributes, and they’re the reason I fell in love with you. They’re the reason I was proud to work for you for almost 3 years. 

But things have changed. YOU’VE changed. When I became a Starbucks partner in the year of our Lord 1999, you put me through rigorous training. I had to know how to take apart an espresso machine and put it back together. I had to know the taste, body, acidity and undertones of every coffee you produced. I had to understand the beauty, nay the ART, of pulling a perfectly layered shot, and the hows and whys of the importance of getting it right every time. For a full week I made the trek to your illustrious offices in downtown Seattle for 8 hour shifts of JUST learning about coffee and why you made it the way you did. Each step carefully and artfully measured. You taught me that coffee wasn’t supposed to be fast, or cheap. It was supposed to be GOOD. You treated your partners as valued commodities, offering us free shares in the company, ample benefit packages, and decent salaries. When I had my first child, you paid for me to stay home with him for three full months. My son’s life is better, forever, because I worked for you. And we passed that feeling of value and appreciation on to the customer. We didn’t just want to pass them down the line like cattle at McDonalds. We wanted to know them, their families, their coffee. We wanted to educate them on what they were drinking. They were paying a lot extra to have a coffee at Starbucks over anywhere else, and we wanted them to know WHY. We wanted every cent to be worth it, because it was worth it to US.

Those were idealistic days, weren’t they? All of us buzzing about in the shadow of then CEO Howard Schultz, an employee of the original Starbucks in the Pike Place Market in Seattle when that was the ONLY Starbucks. He loved you, and he made US love you. Back then Howard didn’t even do advertising for Starbucks. Not a billboard, or magazine ad. Our coffee and our service was our advertising, we had amassed hundreds of locations and millions of customers by word of mouth. A damn good espresso was more valuable than any print ad we could pay for.

But people change. CEOs change. Around the time I left Starbucks, so did Howard. He’s still a figurehead for the company, but his hands aren’t in the beans anymore. Your ideals began to slip. First it was a print ad, then a coupon, then banners and billboards. Then the unthinkable happened. You stopped training your baristas. You filled your stores with automatic espresso machines that pumped out shots that were supposed to be exact, but were soulless. The machines lost calibration and started pumping out weak shots, bitter shots. The baristas had no control anymore, no amount of tamping would be allowed to adjust, no grind could be altered to speed or slow the flow of water through the espresso. Like a Burger King meat patty factory, your machines were farting out unfortunate product en masse. I almost left you then, so broken was my heart to see it. But I wanted to see you pull out of it. I wanted to believe you could go back to being the company you once were; the company that I loved so much.

I cheated on you, I began testing the waters of other relationships. I tried a coffee stand or three, avoiding the cheap tacky lingerie and bikinis but finding only cheap tacky coffee nonetheless. I couldn’t bring myself to step foot into Tully’s. It would be like sleeping with your badly tattooed brother. No, I was a Starbucks girl, I told myself, and I pushed on.

The Starbucks by my kids’ daycare was the first to hurt me. NINE DAYS IN A ROW they made my drink wrong. I thought maybe I was asking too much with a grande no water breve extra foamy chai tea latte. I dumbed it down to a grande half caff toffee nut whole milk with whip mocha. No dice, and these costly mistakes were getting expensive. It’s a tough pill to swallow when you’re drinking $5 worth of yuck. I dumbed it down as much as I could. Half caff tall toffee nut mocha. That’s it. Even that was too much. Time and again I got no toffee nut, or worse, NO CHOCOLATE. That’s not even a mocha! I started turning around and going back and asking them to remake it (at a cost of another 15-20 minutes in driving and standing in line), but the SECOND time that they made it wrong AGAIN after I returned, I gave up. I changed locations. I went to the one in Kirkland near my work. They were rude, blunt, and joyless, but they made my coffee right… at first. I dealt with the attitude at 7 am because I just needed a damn coffee, but pretty soon they were making it wrong too. Again, no chocolate? How does that happen?! I changed again, this time to another location in Kirkland. After having the wrong drink made 3 times in a row, I tried the almost unthinkable. I went to a Starbucks kiosk inside a grocery store. At first it was great! I was so surprised! They remembered my drink on only my 3rd visit, they were cheerful and asked about my day, and my drink was perfection. I was harkened back to the glory days of my time as a partner myself. I remembered even 14 years later the customer I had who ordered a short 2 pumps sugar free vanilla non-fat extra hot no foam latte. His wife ordered a tall 4 pumps chocolate non-fat no whip mocha. For a brief shining moment I thought maybe there was hope for you, for US, after all.

It’s been shattered. Today, for the 2nd time in a row, that girl made my drink wrong. Last time she made it with no chocolate. This time, she made it decaf instead of half caff and forgot the toffee nut.

9 times at the Mukilteo location, plus 3 times at the Kirkland location, plus twice at the kiosk. Different baristas, different locations, all getting it wrong. That’s just the drinks I kept track of, and that’s 14 drinks that were gross. Even if I ONLY got my tall toffee nut mocha, that’s an average of $4 per drink. That’s a minimum of $56 down the toilet, not to mention 2 weeks worth of mornings being disappointed by you. 

I’m a single mom, Starbucks. I get so few luxuries in this life. I don’t get my nails done, or buy expensive make up. I don’t shop at Nordstrom, and I don’t have a fancy car. I don’t go out for drinks with my girlfriends and I don’t have a bunch of cute shoes or purses. But once or twice a week, I go to Starbucks and get a mocha. All I ask is that you take a minute, even 30 seconds, longer to make sure you’re actually giving me what I paid for. You don’t LISTEN anymore. You don’t CARE. It’s been a long time since you’ve cared about me. I see that now. I cannot turn my head to it anymore. My heart won’t let me. My WALLET won’t let me. So here we are, and it’s simple, really:

GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, STARBUCKS! Get your shit together or lose me forever. 

Love,

Joon

I was telling you last week that I hate being the help. I was saying it then because despite my being super sick, my boss left me here so he could go out and “enjoy the sunshine”!

Today I’m hating it because despite having a nasty cold and headache, I came to work anyway. After telling my boss and assistant that I’m terribly sick, and then coughing ridiculous amounts within earshot, he came into my office and telling me he’s going home (it’s noon) because he has ALLERGIES. 

It has nothing to do with it being 86 degrees and sunny out. It’s definitely the ALLERGIES, you guys. 

When I said (probably a bit too venomously), “I’m sick. Do I get to go home too?” He responded, “You’re always sick.” and then left (unbeknownst to him) in the shadow of my giant middle finger. 

I’m sick, pregnant, and nursing a migraine. If I can come to work, I’m pretty sure you and your allergies can manage it. This is the kind of pampered, entitled, wealthy, oblivious Republican that is running most of our corporations - leaving us “help” to clean up the shit for wages that barely reach above poverty level. And then they wonder why “the help” is starting to revolt. 

I’ve got a hell of a cold. Painful sore throat, runny nose, fever. I came to work today anyway because it needed to be done. I’m pregnant so I can’t take more than a lozenge. I’m hurtin’.

My boss knows how sick I am. He knows I was up all night with my daughter who had a stomach flu, so I barely got any sleep. He knows my fiance is here from England, and will only be here for another 4 days.

My assistant suggested I go home. My boss ignored this suggestion. 10 minutes later he announced he was gonna “Get outta here and enjoy this sunshine!!”. Right now he’s on Facebook. In a few minutes he’ll go out to enjoy the day while my sick ass finishes the shift out. 

FUCK. BEING. THE HELP.