Ah Starbucks

Ah Starbucks, their all the same and I love it. Now, here in Billings there are several coffee shops, though far less than I am used to having been schooled in Eugene and raised near Portland. Off the Leaf would be my favorite, because it is a lot like the ones I frequented back in Oregon. There are a few cafes that I also like more than Starbucks. However today I am at Starbucks because it is consistent and because I have a gift card. I still don't have internet set up at my house, so that means Facebook and Google are only available where there is public wify, which I'm ok with because being in public makes it much more likely that I will meet a new friend, and I could use a few of those out here. I find irony in this. At my small studio apartment I don't meet or see any new people, and I don't want to spend time there because I have no internet and little entertainment to occupy my rather hyper self. Boredom forces me down from The Watchtower (the name I've given my studio, borrowed from the Justice Leagues outer space headquarters), into a public space so I can get on Facebook and keep tabs on my friends back home. However, since I need to be in public to do this. See what I'm getting at? It's easy enough to spend hours on Facebook, even if we've read, liked, and played everything that we can, we still stay on that website waiting for a red notification to pop up in the top left corner, which is really (at least in my case) waiting for a digital reminder telling us that someone out there approves of what we do. I know my friends like me. That's why we are friends. And I love it when we can message each other or video chat on a social networking cite, it really can make my day. But when my dedicated addiction to these social mediums robs me of an opportunity to physically be around other people, its gone from something that helps keep us in touch to a thing that will prevent us from receiving any sort of touch. This has all been said before, but with where my thoughts are going as I jog these days I wanted to give a bit of information ion what I think about social networking, since that will be crucial to understanding what I have to say in my next few posts, probably. As always, more is to come. -P.J.