Does this happen to you? You order a tall, no-whip frappuccino at Starbucks, and what you get is your frappucino... topped with a huge, taunting dallop of whip.

That's been happening to me and Babe at many different Starbucks all over the Bay Area. Eight out of ten times we get whip when we ask for none. What is going on?

Are all Starbucks employees semi-deaf, lacking any length of short-term memory, or otherwise incompetent? A former roommate, who was also a former employee at a Starbucks, said that the stores are tightly run, and they put their employees through intense training courses before they are able to start working. Ha! And if that's not the truth, well, how hard can it be to take an order and make coffee?

If it's not incompetence, it must be a conspiracy. Starbucks employees are told not to serve fraps without whip, because without the extra sugar on top they're so-so, banal concoctions unworthy of the $2.50 they demand. Or maybe they know deep down people really want the whip, and ordering a no-whip frap and getting one with whip is sort of like a loophole. If they didn't order it, it's not their fault if it makes them fat.

Try it. Order a no-whip frap and see if you actually get one.

I got talked into joining a friend's fantasy football league.

The draft was on Sunday and took a good four hours to complete. The guys started talking about football and FFL weeks before the draft and the start of the season. They've all been super excited about it. It amazes me how much time and thought they all put into FFL. My friend who is managing the league considers FFL draft day the best day of the year!

I'm not sure what I'm going to get out of the whole experience. Something to do at work for the next few months is enough.

I've had a horrendously garish nailpolish color on my toenails for a whole week.

I selected four nailpolish colors at the nail salon, and asked the woman giving me a pedicure to pick which one she thought was best. Three of the colors were pinkish, and one was a bright orange. She went for that one straightaway.

As soon as the color went on, I was aghast. Well, aghast is too strong a word. I was actually amused by how boldly bad it was. The color looked fine in the bottle, but was totally halloween on my toenails. But I didn't have the heart (nor the time, since I was on my lunch break) to have the poor woman remove it and put on a new color. She'd already labored at my feet for 15-20 minutes, cleaning, massaging, shaping, and otherwise prettying up my toenails.

I meant to remove the color myself soon after, but didn't get around to it over Labor Day weekend. Then I decided to try to keep it on - for as long as I could tolerate it - just to see how many people would notice and say something about it. Sometimes I get a bit of guilty pleasure out of showcasing something yucky on my corpus. Like, when I have an unusually large, shiny, red zit, I purposely don't put concealer on it. And I still have fun showing people those pictures from almost two years ago of the nasty poison oak rash I had on my face.

So far, only one person has actually said something about the nailpolish. I'm disappointed. I caught a little girl staring at my feet when Babe and I were at Pier 39 over the weekend. I'm not going to wait any longer for more of reaction. I can't stand the color anymore, so it's coming off tonight.

My manager was out today, and I didn't have any work to do.

So I read all of Voltaire's Candide online. I read it for the first time today, though it was a recommended read by someone I knew briefly around two years ago. I won't take the time to give you my review of the story, but will say it was much more entertaining than today's news.

And I will give you this quote from the last chapter:
"I would be glad to know which is worst, to be ravished a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet among the Bulgarians, to be whipped and hanged at an auto-da-fe, to be dissected, to be chained to an oar in a galley; and, in short, to experience all the miseries through which every one of us hath passed, or to remain here doing nothing?"

It's a great quote, notwithstanding the bit of racism in the beginning of it, because just yesterday night I told Babe that it dawned on me earlier in the day that being paid to do nothing here at work actually feels worse than being paid to do something I don't like doing. If I was actually doing work, and it was work that I didn't like doing, getting paid to do it would more or less justify spending so much of my time doing it instead of doing what I'd rather be doing. But getting paid to do nothing does not, since I could be doing anything else, especially something I'd rather be doing, with that time, though I may not get paid to do it.

Time lost to doing nothing seems like more of a loss. I don't need to tell you that it's better to be doing something than nothing. And I don't need to tell you that life is too short too not try to make the most out of every moment. However, needing to be paid as much as I am being paid now to do nothing is forcing me to do nothing. And that's my fucking dilemma.

I registered to vote earlier this year so that I could finally do it. But the closer we get to the election date, and the more celebrities tell me to vote, and the more hype there is about voting, the less I want to. Now I don't know if I'm going to or not.

I have my reasons. One of them is that I know I'd be making an uneducated vote. And I can't allow myself to do that. Many other people will be doing that for me, because MTV told them they should vote. Why add to the ignorance?