Coming home from our two day visit with my son, Owen and his lovely wife, Margaret, tired of driving on the Pennsylvania turnpike, my husband and I stopped at a rest area. As I came out of the ladies’ room, I saw said husband, Tom, in the Starbucks line. He never wants to stop at Starbucks, but I always do and I was ready for tea. Did I mention there was a line?

Chatting as we waited, he told me what he was planning to get. I gave him the wifely fishy eye, but said nothing. When it was his turn with the barrista, (that’s the Starbucks term for the counter help, if female) he said, “I’ll have a tall double java mocha espresso double latte, please.” The girl looked at him coldly, but with an eye to the line behind us, and with a gesture said, “Our drinks are on the board.” He looked up in some confusion because he’d thought he had named a drink he had heard of; certainly he had expressed what he wanted to drink. I said, “He needs to be awake.” So, a little grimly, she suggested one of the hot mocha drinks with a double shot of espresso in it. He said, “OK!” Then I asked for my favorite, brewed chai, “In a really big cup, whatever it is called” and got another foul look and the sad information that I could either have another kind of tea or the spiced “milk” product they call Chai Latte. I chose a real tea, which is a pain in the neck for them, but at least they make tea rightly enough, putting the bag(s) in the cup before adding water. No other restaurant does that, since no one drinks tea nor has any waitress (apparently) ever read Orwell.

Just to top our awfulness as Starbucks customers, I pulled out the three cards I currently have and we used up the remnants of two $5 gift card ones. I have a nearly full one that I bought at the local, but cannot tell the cards apart. The now-seriously-simmering barrista had to swipe all three cards to get the correct total to cover our bill.

The best part of the experience, actually, was the look on Tom’s face when he stopped at the side bar where you get sugar, cream, napkins, and after pulling out two packets of Splenda, took the lid of his not very tall drink and saw the inch of whipped cream on top. I didn’t laugh. I did say, “You might want to taste that before adding sweetener,” and pointed to the wood stirs so he could at least poke holes down to his beverage. After a vigorous stirring, he did taste the drink and said, “Yeah” and abandoned the Splenda packets. Then he abandoned me for long enough to get himself a five hour energy drink from a machine, apparently having no faith in his Starbucks coffee.

I must give credit or blame for this post to Robert Cheeks, who is my now friend on Facebook. He saw that I had written about this there and responded with “Blog this!”.

I simply couldn’t bring myself to listen to the president last night. I honor the office, or want to. Honor implies some sort of trust and I cannot find that in myself any longer. I did not listen last night because I cannot stand to hear the president of our nation offer full whoppers about the state of the union. It makes me cry.

This morning, of course, the news is full of commentary on the speech. What I read in the more conservative press was bound to be very negative, so I didn’t read that. The straight news offered me absurdities like the president talking about creating jobs while raising the minimum wage. Doesn’t that mean that jobs are bound to be fewer, with employment dollars spread even more thinly? On top of that, isn’t Obamacare bound to cause a hidden increase in the cost of employing anyone? I’ve heard that each employee will carry about $3 per employee hour just to pay for the new healthcare coverage that we absolutely have to have. Who can afford to hire anyone? What I have read about raising the minimum wage is that eventually the economy absorbs the increase with the inevitable result of making products and services cost more. The dollar adjusts and is worth less. This will have the happy result of making the national debt and the deficit feel lighter. Please, someone tell me I am wrong.

I was giving myself a headache reading the news. I’ll listen to the radio, I thought. I have housework to do. During busy work I often listen to National Public Radio. Good, I thought. They will give me a positive spin on the president’s speech. I did hear plenty of highlights of the president and the news was about the various promises President Obama was making. The female voices of the Morning Edition positively chirped. Despite their cheer, the pattern of my thought as I listened was this: “How is this going to work, if that is true?” For example, how can the president promise this and that benefit while claiming to reduce the deficit? Foreign policy has the same kind of pattern. Of course, I could not stop listening.

Ah! Finally came the NPR Morning Edition analysis of the speech. That was what I was waiting for, a positive spin on anything President Obama says that pretends to be intelligent. Steve Inskeep and NPR reporters are bound to offer the silver lining to the clouds I see going forward. (I do get to feeling like Eeyore on a gloomy day.) Today, no, they do not. Even those guys seemed stunned by the — I want to say bald-faced lies, but they used much softer words. The pattern of their thought was also, “How is this going to work, if that is true?” and worse, “That is not true and this seems unlikely to work, as a result.”

Hopeless. I am left hopeless. Maybe it will take a couple of days for the spin on the State of the Union speech to work around to something positive. I will probably only hear or read that secondhand. Unless this proves the rare occasion in politics when both the Left and the Right agree that the president has worked the union into such a state that only in lying about it can he make any public statement about it. I should be watching for that agreement as an agreeable development. Can I stand to listen?

Note: while washing the dishes and listening to the news, I grabbed a knife by the wrong end. The cut on my finger has not stopped bleeding and I now notice that I have blood all over my keyboard. I note that, as it seems somehow apropos. This is what writing feels like lately, bleeding on the keyboard. And it seems to me that conservative postmodernism eschews bandaids.

Ross Douthat effectively discusses what we should all be reading, mostly in periodicals, in 2013.  He calls it “How to Read in 2013″ and is suggesting we could all effectively read more of what the rest of the political spectrum has to say.  That necessitates what to read, and First Things is on his list.  He has suggestions I have never heard of and perhaps some you haven’t read, either.  “And whenever you’re tempted to hurl away an article in disgust, that’s exactly when you should turn the page or swipe the screen and keep on reading, to see what else the other side might have to say.”

I do read many of Douthat’s suggestions, though the reading of the far Left I had never heard of before.  Maybe if I dug a little further into what the Left says I could understand things like how eating the rich would enrich us all, or why Obama is a great statesman, or any of the other political stands of liberals that I find incomprehensible.

How would you expand Douthat’s list?  What is required reading for 2013?