i don't want to run. just overwhelm me.

the coffee bean at tempe marketplace is making me fat. knowing a delicious and fattening frozen beverage lives less than a mile from my house has been a daily struggle for me for well over a year. i know everyone that works there, and they all recognize me. a few months or so ago, i caught eyes with a boy working behind the bar. he's exactly my type...baby face, sloppy skater-ish hair, dorky. most other girls would overlook him. but i'm consistently attracted to the underwhelming portion of the male population. greg is a perfect example, and tim to an extent, although i think that boy has potential to be devastatingly handsome. anyways, coffee bean boy is not at all devastatingly handsome, but he attracts me nonetheless. this might be due to the way he looks at me. it's a shy look, and he keeps it for just a tad bit longer than he should, and it holds a lot of interest and reverence. almost like he's afraid to look at me. it drives me nuts. it makes me feel like a super model. 

so how do i deal with this? talk to him? flirt? nope. that would be my usual approach in this situation, but it doesn't seem right. and to be honest, he makes me feel shy. we've never talked. he's always behind the bar, he doesn't take my orders. just peeks at me from over the espresso machine. 

through my frequent visitations, i have figured out that he comes into work on saturday at 11. so for the last few weeks, i've been lugging my laptop over to the coffee bean at 10:30 (yes, this requires kristi getting up early) and studying for hours. even if i have no work to do, i just sit there, sipping my delicious beverage, surfing facebook, and peeking at the boy. i try to look as nonchalantly cute as possible. and i am hopelessly shy. i couldn't even get up the nerve to ask him for a cup of water today. it's very uncharacteristic of me. 

i made new strides today. he asked for a rag and one of his co-workers threw one at his face. he laughed and looked over to me, and i gave him a big happy smile. he blushed. it was precious. and as i left, i stared at him to make sure he knew i was leaving. he caught my eye and said "have a good day." he might as well have said "i want to fuck you senseless in the back room" for what it did to the butterflies in my stomach.

it's kind of romantic, in a sickingly unproductive way.

on a less cute note, i heard some news about zack last night. he had been staying at his best friend's parents place while he got on his feet out in arizona. turns out that he had been stealing quite a bit of stuff from them, so they kicked him out and he moved back to utah, where he is being hunted by his psycho inmate brother and his drug lord friends. i wonder if he'll give his girlfriend the jewelry that he never gave back to me. it's always the bad boys, the ones that are trouble, that make me fall the hardest. chase and zack. maybe it's the excitement of knowing it's a bad idea? i had hoped i was smarter than that.

and i got a compliment last night. two, actually. the most obvious of the two was when i walked over to my friends heather and kim, and heather said "we were just talking about you...how you are the most consistently cool person we know. you never pull any shit." d'aww. but the other one, and yes i'm bragging a bit here, but only because it meant so much to me, was that when i walked into the party, i was greeted with cheers and squeals and "omg kristi!"'s and hugs and, even though i made a beeline for the keg, it literally took me over 1o minutes to reach it because people wanted to say hi to me. even ric steele and mark. knowing that people still like me always helps to cheer me up a bit :)