Confessions Of A Splenda Stealer

Oh Dunkin Donuts. First I love you with your 99 cent latte afternoon deal, then I hate you with your eight cent tax. Then, I love you again for being my wake-up call at 2pm on a Friday afternoon in an incredibly over-heated office (narcolepsy central), and now I hate you again:

Um, hello?? Where’s the foam?? Is this what a recession latte is really like? I’ve heard how many establishments are cutting down on ingredients or making portion sizes smaller to keep costs down, but come on…was it the fact that I gave you $1.07 in pennies that pissed you off??

New Yorkers are a quick breed. We enter subway turnstiles with card in hand, throw exact change without a blink when we get our morning coffee, order in code at the deli around the corner for our usual. In and out. Done and done.

Though I have been guilty of sidewalk rage with slow walkers (I will actually bare my teeth) sometimes, I really feel bad for the out-of-towners, who, especially in the morning rush, don’t have a prayer.

Enter scene: 9:06 AM in the Old Bridge Gourmet (ha) Deli on 41st and Lex, across the street from my office. While their coffee isn’t great, for a medium it’s only $1.50 which is the cheapest deal in my block radius. And, from 7 AM to 10 AM, you get a free buttered bagel with a medium coffee! I digress.

It’s one of those delis where the Asian women are yelling NEXT! NEXT! ONE-FIFTAY! NEXT! TWO DOLLAH! NEXT! God forbid you have to stop for a second to find a penny or give them your charge card. It was intimidating at first, now I welcome the challenge. I’ve gotten really fast–I don’t even ask for a bag. The only words I use to communicate are SESAME BAGEL! NO BAG! NO BAG! Yes, I have even grown accustom to repeating my words.

Ever wonder what it would be like to see a bunch of Brits in the middle of this mayhem? It’s not like I have had dreams about this scenario, but think about it. On the whole, they are a very polite people. This morning, in between the shuffling, pouring, tab flipping, (Splenda) packet opening, straw stirring craziness that takes places at the counters of the coffee island, I hear:

SORRY, SORRY! OH, DEAR, I’M SORRY! I JUST WANTED, EMM, THE BA-NA-NA CREAM COFFEE-OH SORRY, SORRY…as they spun around in circles with their empty coffee cups in hand.

As I watched from the quick moving line with my own coffee and quarters in hand, while I definitely found this hilarious, I wasn’t sure if I felt bad for them, or if I was secretly gloating about how I have the system down.

Some say that New Yorkers are rude. Some say that we are intense.

And thanks to George Costanza, sometimes I just think we see the world as a giant Frogger game, with an infinite amount of lives.

We all have one.

You know. That number.

That one number we all keep to ourselves and secretly and instantly compare with others should we ever learn of someone else’s number from a tipsy conversation or a truth or dare moment.

It’s the number we continuously try to justify, asking ourselves, “Am I normal?” or “I’m in my 20s, I’m having fun, so who cares?”

The other day, mine slipped out. And to tell the truth, I was horrified.

The other night I was showing an email to my roommate and, naturally, I had my Gmail open. And then it happened. She saw it—my number, my inbox number—and I think she had palpitations.

Apparently, having an inbox number of 459 messages is a huge “no-no.”

She put my computer down, took me aside, and lectured me on the appropriate use of “archiving” and “labeling” and the fail-proof methods of using them. Of course, there is such a thing as human error, but I can always go back into my trash file to set it right.

It wasn’t so bad. I am wiser now. No one ever told me. Sure, we learned about the early days of email and computer usage back in the day of “computer class” in middle and high school, but methods were so archaic back then, and you could never act like you were actually interested in what the teacher had to say.

I am happy to report that my Gmail inbox is now clean of spam and junkmail, and I am now down to a healthy inbox of 45 messages.

So now that I have shared, I implore you—take care of your emails! Your life is told though your inbox. What does yours say about you??

While reading my Serious Eats newsletter this morning, I got a little too excited when I read this:

Reviewed: New Hershey’s Kisses Pumpkin Spice.

Courtesy of Serious Eats.

Oh sweet Jeebus. When it comes to pumpkin, all I can say is, “Yes please.”

I thought it would be smart to come up with a term for my pumpkin obsession, and because I actually have a lot of work to do today, I decided it best to waste the morning sipping my coffee (the dollar pumpkin late from Dunkin Donuts will come later) as I sat and thought, “Hmmm. What two words could I mash together to exemplify my obsession? Was there already a word for such a thing?”

I pushed ahead. After skimming the comments on the Serious Eats article, fellow pumpkin lovers wrote comments such as, “This is why I love fall! Suddenly everything is pumpkin flavored!” and “I love anything pumpkin flavored!” but not, I am a ______________ (fill in the blank with the word I am now on a mission to find).

It was time to self-diagnose, to find a name to call my people. If you are obsessed with France, you are a francophile. If you have a thing for shoes, some say you have a shoe fetish. What did I have??

One of my favorite things on my computer is my dictionary widget on my Mac. Yes, I know what having a fetish means, but sometimes, even when you’ve heard a word all your life out of context, I think its refreshing to look up true dictionary definitions to words. Plus, I get to giggle at my dancing hula Homer Simpson widget that’s next to my dictionary widget.

My mission became clear. Latin author Gabriel Garcia Marquez  said that he prefers at times to write in the English language rather than Spanish because the English language is quite a melting pot. We have so many words for one thing. Would I need to stick with English or cross a border to find the perfect word??

Since English is my first language, I’ll stick with that for now. I look up fetish:

An inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.

Nope. Try definition #2.

A form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc.

Hmmm. Nah. I love pumpkin, but I don’t loooove pumpkin. I’ve thought about marrying it though. But then again, I vowed to marry my Tide-Wipe Out Pen when it literally wiped out a coffee stain I got on a dress right before I had to report at a trade show.

I was stuck. I looked up phile:

-phile: combining form, denoting fondness for a specified thing

Bingo! OK, I had the suffix, but now what to use for pumpkin. Do I have to be all scholarly and find out the Latin term for pumpkin? Is there one?

Oh, but of course. Found in a NYTimes article from 1991:

The name pumpkin is believed to be derived from a Greek word, pepon, or a Latin word, pepo, which is also used to describe melons.

Am I a pepophile?? Oh. Well. The end of my research appears to be somewhat anticlimatic. That word doesn’t sound as glamourous as I had hoped…

If I were to post on Meetup.com for pepohiles in the NYC area to get together, I doubt I’d get any replies. Well knowing NYC, I’d probably get a few, but definitely not anything pumpkin related.