Secrets and Starbucks Sweetness

I'm a coffee drinker. I LOVE Kapeng Barako and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee beans. One of my favorite places in the world is the "eskinita" in front of the market stall in Lipa, Batanggas where they sell Barako coffee by the kilo, freshly ground and positively hypnotic. Rumor has it that the most delicious kind of brewed coffee is the kind that is prepared the traditional way (in a pot over a stove poured over a kettle through an old sock used as filter. Yum!Yum!) And there were stories that my mom, hailing from the beautiful city of Lipa started drinking coffee when she was 8 years old. I don't know if t's true. I'm just romanticizing over some history, that's all. But I do know that I love my coffee.

But here's the thing. Despite what's been happening in the recent past, I am NOT a Starbucks frequenter. The lovely oak 2012 planner sitting on my bedside shelf is a solid contradiction to that statement, but I'm really not. Or was not, hahaha! I like coffee shops, but I've never been particular about any brand or label. I take my coffee the same way I choose my clothes, I suppose. I account for taste (my taste, haha! or moods) rather than labels. Not to say that Starbucks doesn't have good coffee. I'm just saying you don't usually see me going out of my way to get any particular kind of coffee for a caffeine fix.

Until...

"Love, gusto mo planner?"
"Sure!"

And then he hands me a sticker card from Starbucks with TWO! (Not ONE! but TWO!) stickers in place, making me TWO! stickers less on my royal road to owning MY VERY OWN! Starbucks 2012 Planner Limited Edition!!!

Drumrolls. Applause. Applause.

I was being sarcastic.

I really thought he was giving me an actual planner right there and then. It turns out, I have to "earn" my planner by spending thousand of my hard earned money for a planner with too little space for my brand of writing, ergo, a planner that I might never use.

Sigh...

But it's pretty...:)

And the sticker card was from Christopher... :)

I know! I know!

I'm such a dork.

So in the next two weeks, In was on a quest. With some help from some friends who gladly shared my coffee, and co-workers who are the true-blue Starbucks fans who shared stickers when they managed to fill up their sticker cards AGES ago! Also, to my big brother who thoughtfully gave me my last two stickers to culminate my quest: My deepest, fondest gratitude to you all will last three-hundred sixty-five days, plus an additional month! :)

I'm such a dork I hate myself!

So yes. I have a 2012 Limited Edition Starbucks Planner that I think is the prettiest thing, but it's a pretty thing I might never use and whose main reason for existence is because I'm such a big, big, hopeless dork, falling for a guy who would give me a sticker card from Starbucks when he doesn't even like going there.

Ah, but the sweetness. :) We watched this Thai movie the other night called Crazy Little Thing. It's about a young girl who's in love with this popular guy and she makes herself prettier and smarter and more popular so he would fall for her too... I realize I just described to you the plot of more than half the romance movies in the world, but it's not important. It was cheesy. It was so cheesy we actually stayed up all night watching it together, throwing snide comments and rude gestures to the innocent laptop, even though we were both acutely aware of how giddy we undeniably were but both of us nonetheless too proud to admit it. So we just pretended we were cool and didn't care for the cheesy stuff until the entire movie was over, credits and all.

Anyway, tangential! I was going to say that there was a scene where she ran to the gym where her crush was supposed to be in a fistfight with another guy but instead of finding him, she picks up a button that she assumed fell from his uniform during the fight. A button! Not a handkerchief. Not a friggin' ID card. She finds a button on the dirt and fools herself into believing that it was his. That's how stupid people in love can get. It's so annoying I wanted to hit something. A diddley-doo-ha button, transcending holiness because of the slightest possibility that it came from the immediate proximity of someone impossibly unattainable.

Like the relics of John the Baptist...

But I go back to my previous argument: "Ah, but the sweetness...:)"

And I had a friggin' sticker card and a planner to bet against the diddley-doo-ha.

Tsk.Tsk.

Like I said, I'm such a dork. I'm hopeless.

There's also this online community that I visit every now and then called PostSecrets. People from all walks of life send in postcards containing their secrets to this guy named Frank Warren who then transforms them into best-selling books. There are some really good artwork in some of those postcards and really juicy secrets too. Some of them are cute. Some of them are outright gross. Some carry a little too much information. Others are pretty inspiring and still others just plain touching. It happens that with the freedom that comes with anonymity, one can't help but come across secrets that actually sound pretty familiar. This one in particular.

No offense meant to anyone.

I have a secret too.

The person who shares the sentiment on that postcard is the reason why I have a Starbucks 2012 planner sitting prettily on my bedside shelf.

Ah, the sweetness...

I'm such a dork I'm impossible!