just a few things that did not make me too happy to think about on this beautiful autumn monday.

exhibit a
starbucks raises its prices
you’d think that after paying premium prices the past two years for this particular brand, it would somehow reward you with discounts or some sort of frequent-buyer card, but nope – starbucks flexes its muscular brand and raises it prices. grande coffee in nyc is now $2.01 after taxes, up from $1.90. 11 cents! i drink around 10 coffees a week, so that comes to more than a dollar per week, four bucks a month, almost $50 a year! not cool. i could have used that to buy myself a muffin every two weeks. ugh.

exhibit b
inability to stay awake during film theory screenings
i took a film noir class my sophomore year and i remember staying awake and even being enthralled for most of the films we watched. the same for script analysis and even the international film history class. but film theory films (and films from the silent screen class i took last year) have the uncanny ability to knock me out in my seat. i tried my best today to watch vertov’s man with a movie camera and while i tried to stay interested for the first 10 minutes, the other 58 minutes were added to the running total of hours-slept-during-film-class-in-the-past-three-years. the worst is when i sleep through movies and have to sit another hour while the professor fields questions and comments from the students about the movie we just watched. it becomes a total waste of time, and it’s a shame that i wake up in time for this painful portion of my 4-hour film theory class. am i unfit for such rigorous intellectual study of my chosen discipline?