A coffeehouse, a right-branching NP, and some eye contact

I, in a sense, played hooky today. It was only hooky-in-a-sense, or a sad excuse for hooky, because I’ll be going in to do an experiment tomorrow. I’ll be doing an experiment tomorrow because it will be my last chance to do one for ~3 weeks, because on Monday our lab is getting shut down for ~3 weeks. Fortunately, the lab getting shut down is not my fault, nor is it the fault of any other human, so far as anyone can determine. Fortunately after those ~3 weeks, we should be back up and running, no harm, no foul.

So the morning started with my attempt to attend the summer picnic on Angel Island that The Aviator’s Medical Institute was hosting today. Because I was too lazy to plan, and because the F-Market always takes longer than you think it will, I arrived at Pier 41 at 9:55 a.m., which ended up being not early enough to catch the 9:45 a.m. ferry. Upon seeing that the next ferry on weekdays is at 1:20, I realized I would be skipping the company picnic.

Unfortunately, I realized this after I had thrown away my Muni transfer. I checked my wallet pockets and realized that I did not have another $1.50, so I went looking for a business where I could break my $10 bill by purchasing a product I desired. I found a Starbucks.

Item 1: When I am in a Starbucks and am feeling frivolous and gay, I tend to indulge in a Grande Mocha Frappuccino. Lately I have been trying to reduce the number of calories I consume, and as such, I have started ordering on these occasions the Light variety of this drink, without whip. All fine and good, right? But there is a problem! The problem comes when I try to convey my desires to the barista. Since I am a native speaker of English, it is my instinct to place adjectives before the nouns they modify. So when I want to add a new modifier, “Light,” to the phrase “Mocha Frappuccino,” I want really badly to place that modifier first. I yearn, my friends, to order a “Light Mocha Frappuccino.” And so that’s typically what I ask for.

But the baristas do not like this! Nowhere in the city do they tolerate this! As you likely know, it is Starbucks SOP to confirm the customer’s order by repeating it back to him or her. When I order a “Venti Coffee,” the barista will repeat “Venti Coffee” back to me. But they do not say “Light Mocha Frappuccino” back to me. Instead, they say, with politely didactic intonation, “Mocha Frappuccino Light.” And if you look up at the menu, it does say “Mocha Frappuccino Light.” WTF? That’s such a fucking unnatural-sounding construction. Why, Starbucks, why? Why do you insist on this awkward word order? I mean, it’s not as if, when I desire the aspartame-sweetened take on Coca-Cola, I am expected to ask for a “Coke Diet.”

I’ve even tried to remember to use the baristas’ preferred word order, in the spirit of “when in Rome,” but I must be incapable of doing so, as I continue to make this mistake almost every time I indulge in a frivolous Starbucks moment.

Item 2: I picked up my drink. I realized that because I now had no place to be for several hours, I could, if I wanted, idle in the café. I looked around the room and suddenly found my eyes to be in contact with an attractive young woman who was sitting in the corner and working on what appeared to be homework. The eye contact lasted, I believe, several hundred ms, and after being broken by a saccade or two it was restored for another couple hundred ms. I saw that there was an empty table next to the young woman. I started to walk over there, thinking, “Ah hell, maybe I should go sit by her and talk to her. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do in these situations?”

I stood a foot from the empty table for about two seconds. I almost sat down. Then I thought the better of it, spun around, and headed to a nice isolated table outside.