I know I had an interview up earlier, but I felt like rambling, and so I indulged. I have now replaced it with something pointless, useless, and all around unhelpful.

Enjoy. (Or ignore, if you want to save five minutes of your life.)

I've never particularly liked Starbucks. It's not that I dislike it as an establishment; I've just never been very into coffee. But I went to Starbucks the other day (I'm sorry, let me rephrase that: I was brutally forced into a Starbucks by my bonkers cousin and my other mentally unbalanced friend), and I have to tell you those Starbucks employees must boil up gallons of coffee and shoot that stuff straight into a vein. My friends and I were hovering patiently in the line--which stretched halfway to the door--but, before we were even close to the front, this (albeit adorable) tower of a guy with a faux-hawk popped up and practically begged to know our orders. Like our answers were absolutely crucial and his life hung in the balance.

Scary. Potatoes.

Anyway, I didn't want any coffee, so I asked for a hot chocolate and the conversation basically deteriorated from there:

Faux-Hawk Boy: "What do you want?"

Me: "Um...hot chocolate."

Faux-Hawk Boy: "What kind?"

Me: "What?"

Faux-Hawk Boy: "What kind of hot chocolate? We have regularhotchocolatesignaturehotchocolateicedsignaturehotchocolatewhitehotchocolatehazelnuthotchocolateandicedhazelnuthotchocolate."

(This was apparently the list of different hot chocolates they carried minus the usual pauses in conversation reserved for taking breaths, which my cousin explained later. Apparently, Starbucks takes "Pauses for Breath" out of its employees' paychecks. Unfortunately, no one bothered to mention that I would need a warp-speed translation chip implanted directly into my brain to translate from English to Starbucks-speak. Who knew? And may I just ask: What the hell is an Iced Hot Chocolate? Does no one else see the idiocy of this drink? Anyone?)

Me: "Um..." --dazed and slightly terrified; meanwhile my cousin is chanting "Hazelnut, hazelnut!" in my ear like she's shouting out winning lottery ticket numbers-- "I guess I'll have hazelnut."

Faux-Hawk Boy: "What size?"

Me: "What sizes do you have?" (I know this is a stupid question but some places try to trip you up by going, "Hey! We've got small and large, but we don't carry medium! We're just special like that!" WTF?)

Faux-Hawk Boy: "Tall, Grande, Venti." (Anyone else a little concerned that they tap-dance all over the map with this? English to Spanish to Italian, and they all mean, essentially, "Really Big".)

Me: --really, REALLY terrified and in desperate need of a translation-- "Um..."

Faux-Hawk Boy: --taking pity on me-- "I know they all sound like larges, but it's pretty much just small, medium, and large."

Me: "Right...I'll just have whatever's a medium in the real world."

Faux-Hawk Boy: --smiling-- "Fair enough."

And then he dashed off to get my drink, leaving me feeling like I'd just survived a hurricane.

I know this might not seem so scary to people who frequent Starbucks, but at the time I was sure I was going to have to either hit my emergency eject button or grab a plastic spoon and dig an escape route to safety. And the hot chocolate tasted like they'd lit it on fire. How do you burn hot chocolate?

The Moral Of This Story: Drink Starbucks. It's spaz-a-licious.