Hek-Potato

As of November 12, 2008, these are Hektor's measurements:
- Neck: 11" behind the ears, 11.75" on the lower neck, above the shoulders
- From nose to tail along his back, 21.5"
- From upper back down his front legs, 12"
- Chest circumference, 18"
- Width of face, 4.75"
- Weight, 15.2 pounds

He's going to weigh about 25 pounds when he's full grown with a 15" neck. The rest of his measurements are off only by a few inches except for his chest, which should grow for several more inches.

Hektor has been sleeping with us for the past few nights because we're visiting family for Thanksgiving. He has very good bed etiquette: he doesn't come towards our faces to harass us, he doesn't hog the bed, he goes to the foot of the bed and only requires an ankle or a calf on which to prop his head. During the early morning, even when his little bladder is filled to the brim (I can only guess), he only paces a little to ease his discomfort; he does not come up to our heads to wake us.

Change doesn't settle well with him and we want to make him as calm as possible after his first airplane ride by having him sleep with us. We didn't have to drug him, and he slept for most of the way, so it was easier than we had anticipated. I wasn't sure I wanted to put Benadryl in his system at such a young age, but it was unnecessary anyway.

He is still peeing indoors occasionally, and actually pooped once on my boyfriend's mother's new rug, so we still have to work on those aspects of his training. He's been a good pup and companion to us, though. It's been well worth it.

"Why Is It That You Broads Want All Or Nothing?"

Erica Barry: Ever been married, Harry?

Harry Sanborn: No. No, I haven't.

Erica: Wow. Now, why do you think that is?

Harry: Well, some people just don't fit the mold, and so far, you know...

Erica: Hey, if it ain't broke...

Harry: Exactly.

I'm turning 25 this year. I've been in a relationship with the same person for four years now, and the indelicate questions from families and friends have started to arrive. "So...when are you guys gonna get married?" "Hey, wow, four years. About time to get the show on the road, huh?" "You think you guys are going to be engaged soon?" Similar questions plague my friends who are in similar situations, but the difference between us is that they actually want to be married, to go through the whole ritual rigamarole, to endure the preceding hubbub and the subsequent tedium of thanking people, etc. For the most part, my friends have a tentative timeline for this whole process. For myself, I have no problem with the status quo, and hey, if it ain't broke...

The problem I'm anticipating is the reactions from all the nosy, but well-meaning, people who ask me about my non-existent marriage plans. I'm 24 and get the understanding nods when I tell people that I want to wait. They think that I'm wise and not impetuous. This situation will be drastically different when I'm in my late 20s and my relationship is close to a decade old ::knocking on wood::. People just can't seem to wrap their minds around a functional couple who do not want to be married. It is part of the natural progression, they argue. It makes it official, they say. Well, I don't know what they think I've been doing with this dude, but everything so far has felt damn official and in a progressing manner to me. We met, we liked each other, we started dating, and eventually we moved in together. We now share a life, a dog, some of the same dreams, most of the same hopes, and our days are wonderful.

I had a guy recently lecture me on the marriage subject. He told me to cut it and leave if I don't want to be married to a guy I've been dating for four years, because according to him, "What's the point?"

The point, ah, actually comes in the form of a fork. One prong of it is that marriage is not the end-all-be-all of relationships. Particularly nowadays, the idea of marriage, for many women in my generation, is wrapped around the concept of the wedding. Coming from a relatively privileged background, my friends think about couture wedding gowns, a classy and understatedly fancy venue, dressing the entourage, and honeymoons at international destinations. I don't think my mother even had a wedding dress, and I know she definitely did not get an engagement ring. My boyfriend's mother made her own wedding dress. The day of the wedding is anticlimatic, because from what I can see at weddings I've attended, the bride and groom are usually worrying about logistics or how other people are enjoying themselves; they seem to have fun, but in a removed sort of way, and they are definitely not having as much fun as some other people at their wedding.

The second prong is that his argument places the highest worth on the actual sealing of the deal, but not the deal itself. It is a bigger deal to me that two people are in a healthy, functional relationship, than two people who are married, but not happy. To think that being with someone for four years and not constantly have marriage on the brain, or have marriage be an end, is pointless is incredibly shortsighted, and these are the numbnuts who are creating the glowing statistic of a 50% divorce rate.

The third prong is that life is a journey via many different routes. Who is to say that convention is key? If we all live to be happy, and happiness for some is to carry on a loving relationship with someone, with or without legal sanction, why make it a point to have to be married? I'd like to think that a relationship expires in its tenth year, so when I'm 30, I hope to be on my second partner, who I also don't want to marry. By the time I'm 60, I'll be on partner number 5, and in my estimation, I will have lived quite a broad and fulfilling life.

This is not to say that people who are married now, or people who wish to be married, are narrowminded halfwits who should expend their energies on something more worthy. I have been moved to tears at more than one wedding, because the two people pledging their love and lives to each other were so RIGHT for one another. I couldn't place my finger on why else I was blubbering like an idiot, all runny-nosed and puffy-eyed, if the situations hadn't been so...inevitably right. So, if it's right for you, get married! Have a ball! But know that it might not be right for others, so stop asking inane, nosy questions just to satisfy your petty curiosity. That's what dlisted.com and other gossip blogs are for.

Better Than A Woman

“It’s lost its mom-and-pop home-away-from-home feel,” said Aga Machauf, a 26-year-old event planner, while sipping a grandé caramel macchiato. “It feels more corporate now.”
- Michael Barbaro and Andrew Martin's "Overhaul, Make It a Venti" about Starbucks, NYT

I first had Starbucks's when I was 13, in 1997, after school one day at the store on Union Square East. I had a Tall Frappuccino, because I wanted the smallest size, and because all my friends were having some other version of the Frappuccino, either with mocha or with caramel or with crack. My friends and I liked the upholstered chairs there, and we would play card games while we sipped away at our drinks ladened with sugar and caffeine. The barista, or rude asshole, as we knew him, would make snide comments like, "Don't you kids have homework or something?" because we required him to rinse out the blender for every single one of our drinks, since no two were the same. We were kids; we didn't want to have the same kind of Frappuccino as the next person. That would have been lame.

The thing is, I don't think we ever felt like it was a mom-and-pop home-away-from-home kind of place. It was a place where we paid for drinks that were expensive, and it was a place that provided us with a table and seats until it was late enough to go home and do homework. For $3.42 or however much it was to get a Tall Frappuccino those days, it was a cheap babysitter, if anything. While there, we didn't smoke pot, or have unprotected sex, or steal, so I guess ingesting a whole bunch of caffeine was the lesser evil. No, but it didn't make us feel like this was a warm place where we could have enjoy our beverages uninterrupted, and at anytime, could have wrapped ourselves up in throws, curled up with a good book, and quietly dozed off. It was a freaking Starbucks, and the reason we were there was because it was better than the MacDonald's across the street where the janitor yelled at us for sitting crosslegged in the booths. From the green aprons to the printed napkins to the interior design theme, it felt damn corporate from the first step in to the last sip before we stepped out to head home.

Geoff Vuleta, chief executive of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consultancy in New York, said Starbucks had lost focus on the experience that drew customers in the first place by neutering the baristas and by crowding the stores with merchandise, or as he put it, “replacing mystique with relentless commerce.”

“We all remember our initial encounters with Starbucks: the exoticism of new language, space, sounds and smells,” Mr. Vuleta said in an e-mail message. “Fast-forward a decade, and the first thing that jumps out is that the mystique that so thoroughly defined the initial experience is conspicuously absent — trampled in the stampede of proliferation.”

Where did the NYT find these people? When you go to France, you are bombarded with "the exoticism of new language, space, sounds and smells". When you step into Starbucks for the first time, it smells like COFFEE. The exoticism of its language is broken down into three words denoting size, one of which means BIG, and the rest is just espresso and its few dilutions. From memory, our "barista" from the get-go was already a eunuch, and the music was never more than innocuous, immemorable tunes. I have such a problem with people who try to be bleeding hearts and who try to lament every damn thing that's "not as good as it used to be". Starbucks was never that good. At least not by the time it was common enough that we found one in every neighborhood we lived.

I had my first espresso when I was in eighth grade, in 1996, and it was bitter, but fragrant and nutty. I had no idea how much better it can taste until years later, but the flavor of espresso is something I distinctly did not associate with any of Starbucks's drinks. I was a freshman in college before I saw that my Grande Skim Latte was actually a drink with two shots of espresso and a messy pour of skim milk topped with that anemic, stiff looking foam. It was a matter of ritual that my friends and I went to Starbucks in college, since there was one right in the building next to our classes, and since it took our electronic meal points. Once we grew beyond having meal points on our ID cards, most of us stopped going there and opted for other better cafés.


As we all grew up and grew out of Starbucks, I attached myself to two espresso joints: Zibetto on 6th and 56th, and Ninth Street Espresso. They served more potent and flavorful brews, and each espresso drink came out like its own little dream. The milk was not milk, nor was it foam. It was some viscous, molten solid that neither splashed nor sloshed in the cup. When the baristas poured, the steamed milk joined the espresso and lolled around until the mixture reached the brim. Will I get a rosetta leaf today, or a heart? Even if it's just a random squiggle, I would be happy. From the first heady sip, to the last lick of espresso foam, as Martin Crane on Frasier said in the episode where he accidentally eats a pot brownie and gets the munchies, "you taste that and tell me that’s not better than a woman."