The End of My Library Card Collection (Or, Spirals Forward, Part One)

My hair is finally brown, totally and completely brown. Just yesterday, while gabbing away with my Mexican hairdresser, I almost didn’t notice as the last pink-tainted-blonde ringlets fell to the floor. I continued to gab, without pausing for reflection or sigh. Things come full circle, they always do. A trip to Mexico before embarking on grad school awaits, and I find myself needing reflection, a nice clean package with which to box up the last two years.

Should I make a list of what I’ve done? Can enumeration alleviate uncertainty?

painted a  bedroom (4 times),

submitted my two weeks notice and said my goodbyes to coworkers and customers (5)

lived somewhere for more than a month (7)

donated a large portion of what I own, not as charity, as a cleansing (3)

bought a spontaneous ticket to Latin America (2)

paid my library fines ($129.87 total)

found and left someone I love dearly (2)

registered for a new library card under a new address (4)

Or should I focus on the negative space? Can we surmise a journey by understanding all the aspects that weren’t overturned? The lessons lost? The silly things you people who stay in one place don’t even realize how privileged you are to have?: Your own bottle of catsup, coolwhip in the fridg, makeup that is stored in baskets rather than bins, earrings that aren’t compacted, a television, a whole drawer of comfy t-shirts, a garden that you can watch grow, an actual coffee maker, a set of pans. But above all, some of you, the luckiest amongst you, have wonder of all wonders: giant bottles of shampoo. Bottles that are so big they are hard to lift. A purchase entirely impractical for someone who might move, for someone whose hair needs might change. It’s ridiculous, I know, but I can’t stop thinking about the wonder of those giant bottles of shampoo.

Should I draw a picture? Will geometry enable cohesion? Surely, despite all of this and because all of this, I have arrived back at the person I was. To quote Octavio Paz:

The geometric figure that symbolizes [my journey] is the spiral, a line that continuously returns to its starting point and that continuously distances itself more and more from it. The spiral never returns. We never return to the past and thus every return is a beginning.

Or should I simply give up on nice neat lessons and focus on the practical. Yes, thats it, time is running short and I need to pack.

No, thats not it, I need to unpack.  Well, whichever you prefer.

Posts I Would Have Liked to Write: (A Hodge-Podge of Obversvations)

• Subtle Subtle Racism or Self Love: “Will you Watch my Comp?” Asking someone to watch your computer is no big deal, but who you ask, and why you ask one person over another, speaks volumes about cultural assumptions of morality.

• I’ll Take The Darkest Coffee You Got, the Woman will take a Latte. Especially in Boston, ordering coffee was always a gendered process. Men would often order “the strongest, darkest coffee” while attempting to flirt. But how does something as commonplace as coffee, or a type of coffee, come to be a locus for gendered, power hierarchy.

• An Ode to Cities Everywhere. I love cities, and never want to live somewhere that I have to drive to my closest coffee shop. I wanted to draw a picture all about why.

• Zizek and Coffee Shop Organics, Fair Trade. Once you acknowledge a problem, something has to be done. Zizek writes that what we tent to do is convince ourselves that we are actively fighting a problem when in fact, we are contributing. Fair trade? A band aid solution. Organic? Just another corporate takeover.

• Foggy City-Living. Although some cities, San Francisco and Manhattan, offer ban unparalleled assertion of humanness through sheer exposure, they can also offer a dream world where things like conservatism, the cult of consumption, and corporate takeover of everyday life, simply don’t exist.

• The Intricacies of Coffee Branding. Coffee is a product to be advertised just like any other commodity and advertising is all about Anthropology.

• Coffee Shop Politics. Some coffee shops offer a great example of how political expression has shifted to more subtle, often entrepreneurial, endeavors.

• Why My Barista Terrifies Me and Always Will. Once you’ve walked in someone else’s shoes, you become hype aware of the rocks, and pitfalls they experience in the day-to-day. Hyperaware, I constantly aspire to be the best costumer possible.

• Gentrification is the New Crack, Coffee Shops at the Forefront. Unfortunately, many of the places I have lived in the past couple years, limited by my minimum wage salaries, have been sites of rapid gentrification.

• How to Spot a Starbucks Lifer. I don’t just mean accidentally saying Venti,. Its amazing but not only has Starbucks redefined our lexicon of coffee terms, they have also revamped and streamlined the progression and rhythm of coffee ordering, not to mention our conception of coffee itself.

• All this Outfit Needs is a Cup of Coffee. In many ways, coffee, especially carefully branded coffee, acts as a fashion accessory, speaking volumes about your consumption choices, your economic status, even your political inclinations.

Why Computer Outlets are Disappearing, a Return to Coffee Shop Roots

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, many coffee shops, especially in the major cites, are getting rid of their power outlets (related article). While this is partly a question of cost (paying 1.50 for a cup of coffee and spending four hours on the internet doesn’t exactly seem fair) this also cuts to the core of the coffee shop ontology. It forces us to ponder: what is a coffee shop?

An outlet cover at Ritual in San Francisco

A coffee shop is a place you go to get coffee yes, but, lets face it, almost of all of us know how to make coffee in our house or offices. We go to coffee shops for other, quantifiable reasons. In particular, we go to coffee shops to interact, to not be alone. To not be physically alone.

Relative isolation is increasingly prevalent in our society. In 1995 Robert Putnam, a Harvard political science professor wrote his classic work, Bowling Alone, to describe this phenomenon, already prevalent as the internet was just making its mark. Putnam says that both rising technology – more time spent doing individual activities like sitting in front of a television or computer – and housing choices – more individual room than we’ve ever had before – are to blame for this social disconnect.

And so, while coffee shops are a place to get coffee, yes, they are also a place to interact, and it is precisely this second aspect that coffee-shop owners are trying to promote through their decision to get ride of outlets: My laptop is out of batteries. Your’s too? Care for a chat?

Cartoon Courtesy Emmet Truxes (etruxes.com)

American Coffee, Through the Looking Glass

Looking back it seems like almost all my time in Peru was spent either desperately seeking coffee or exhausted on a bus. Again, I found myself waiting in a hybrid mall/station. Wonder of all wonders there was a shop that only sold coffee (as opposed to the standard restaurant that happened to also sell coffee). And, lo and behold, there on the board: “American Coffee” with the underlying description: coffee with cream.

Ooh, yes yes coffee with cream not milk! What a treat! What a bastion of hope. How wonderful! Si, si, café con crema por favore! Que bueno!

And so, there I was with my American coffee: Black. Strong. Whipped cream on top. I laughed until I cried. We Americans, we always get our just desserts.

Boston Tainted-Gaze (Part 2, Enter Foucault)

Power is a constant underscore to every interaction, every setting, every object. Your water bottle speaks volumes about power. Your computer? Don’t even get me started.

I wrote earlier about how customers in Boston were often unpleasant and brusque whereas in San Francisco and New York customers were quite the opposite. They would try to be my friend, were excessively polite, tipped, made conversation, and were generally quite enjoyable.I recognize now that this isn’t a question of relative niceness between certain populations, this is a question of power. In San Francisco and New York, I had the power. I was the coffee dictator, the boss, someone to be esteemed. And then I moved to Boston and I was a scourge, 180 degrees from where I used to be on the totem pole.

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Bartender, Another Hot Coffee Please

Some psychology for your weekend:

Science shows people who have recently drank a cup of hot coffee are more likely to be generous towards others and more likely to be seen as positive, warm, friendly, and attractive. This is especially true when making first impressions.

The trick  is that hot coffee increases your body temperature which in turn effects how people gauge our personality. I like to think that everyone has a unique energy surrounding them, and in some ways, this proves that its true (that I’m not just a hippie, a hippie backed by science). It also proves that, put bluntly, no one likes a coldfish.

Coffee Shop Interactions to the FACE(book)

In case it hasn’t already become clear, I have a little bit of an obsession with how people see themselves and then enact those identities. I suppose there are worse things to be addicted to, but I’ve come at a bad time, or more aptly, a time when identity formation is changing so rapidly that it is almost impossible to study without all your theories being entirely destroyed. I will never forgive Mark Zuckerburg for this. Never.

People used to form their identities through face-to-face interaction: what happened in the halls of high-school, at drive-ins, in coffee shops, at protests. Identities were read and written (in the metaphorical sense) on bodies and through actions.  And then there was AIM, and we all had profiles but none of them said too much and mostly we just giggled a lot about what he said and she said and that guys font and OMG did he use an emoticon?

Enter Facebook: now identities are read and written (in the literal sense), and well, what’s the certainty and individuality in that? It doesn’t really matter that I’ve never seen you pick up a book in your life; look how many favorites you have listed! And your interests? Running! I never would have known. We can even change how we look; I am a notorious de-tagger, about one in twenty pictures make the cut, very few of them from the last couple years. I’m still twenty, I swear, or at least, what’s there to prove otherwise?

Referring to Marx, Slavoj Zizek writes: “What are all the protests against global capitalism, in comparison to the internet?” But perhaps more aptly, I will adjust: what is an uprising, a new trend in graphic tees, a revamping of US politics, or anything that changes our identities compared to Facebook? The answer of course something, but not much, not much at all.

And these radical globe-shifting changes are happening all the time, too fast, too fast. Take what happened recently:Mark Zuckerburg stole my (inter)face.

At the very least, we used to control both the design and the content of our identities. There was room for creativity, self expression, individuality. I used to have style! And class! And now, well, I’d rather be nothing at all than an uncrafted, homogenous, white-washed looking list. Everything has changed, a global shift. Damn you Facebook, I had spent so much time, had so many theories, and now they’re all moot, totally irrelevant.

And what’s worse, now I’m going to have to create my identity the old-fashioned way. Coffee anyone?

Analyzing Borders in Social Space: Architecture, Coffee Shops, Communities

A wise humorist once quipped: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” This is hilarious, agreeable. I’m much more intrigued by the fact that we do dance about architecture. And architect about dancing? Yea, that too.

Someday I hope to write my dissertation on how people form their identities, delineating their groups from others on multiple levels, creating borders in their minds. But people also form identities through those borders in the tangible world: the dividers, the walls, the architecture. These edges, physical and imagined, separate an inside from an outside, limit the scope of vision and interaction, and derive their importance from their own seeming immutability.

Like borders, communities and identities — architecture creates culture and culture creates architecture. One example: think about all the ways your night succumbs to the layout of the bar. Was there a dance floor and now you’re exhausted? Low lighting that contributed to your regrets of the following morning? And the architects and builders, who are they and what they create if not products of their cultures and past experiences?

Oscar Newman, a sociologist-cum-architect, famously discovered that there were lower crime rates within low-income housing projects than in high-rise apartment buildings. They key was that within the large high-rises, “residents felt no control or personal responsibility for an area occupied by so many people” (Wiki). Under the broad heading of “defensible space” Newman also deduced that in housing units whose back-doors opened towards each other, residents would be forced to watch and recognize that they were being watched by, their neighbors. They defended each other’s space. Their borders and boundaries were broken down by a sheer lack of walls and they became a community rather than factions.

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Boston Tainted Glass

A mutual friend of my boyfriend and I has authoritatively declared on her Facebook profile: Love is when you give someone all of your French fries and don’t ask for any of theirs in return. As a direct result my intake of French fries has been indefinitely doubled. This is wonderful, but I’d like to make the following addendum: Love is unabashedly eating all of your boyfriend’s French fries because you’re demoralized by Boston’s coffee culture.

I could go on at length about the horrors of working at a cafe in Boston, but the worst, the absolute worst part, is the constant condescension.

When you work at a coffee shop in New York or San Francisco people assume you’re cool, you’re trendy, you’re in between more serious pursuits, you’re most likely an artist. When you work at a coffee shop in Boston, people assume you’re a screw up. They presume that you didn’t go to college, that you’ll probably be working minimum wage jobs your entire life, that you couldn’t get a more prestigious profession even if you tried.

“I gave you a twenty, my drink was 2.50, you should give me 17.50 back”. Really? Thanks. I never could have figured that out. Do you want to talk about abstract analysis too?

Yea, I’m going to school in the fall. “Oh, where at?” New York. Oh yea, the junior college there? Nah, Columbia. Silence. “Oh, I never would have guessed.”

What bothers me most is how much these assumptions reshaped my self-esteem.  We create our identities by imagining how other people see us. Carles Horton Cooley coined the term “looking glass selves,” to explain that from the time we are very young we develop our notion of Self by looking through the eyes of an Other.  I saw the way these Bostonians saw me and  it made me start to wonder. Their constant condescension had crafted itself into my identity. Maybe I am a scourge?

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The Accidental Gatekeepers

Although we are all friends, it would be easy to separate the workers of Atlas Café into two entities. The cashiers stay in the front; we are all white, all young, all semi-hipsters with a perfect grasp of English. And then behind us are the cooks, the Mexicans. They speak only Spanish and are almost all related. They quip constantly. Jose owns fifty pairs of shoes. One time Santos hid a habanero pepper in Edwin’s mixed fruit and now he will never venture towards fruit ever again. Oscar gets too excited when he talks, it makes him hard to understand.

And just as we have so many obvious differences, we are also so much alike. I get too excited when I talk, it makes me hard to understand. The cashiers have people come visit us, the cooks have people come visit them. We give stuff away, they give stuff away. For both sides, if you are a family or a good friend then you belong here, we don’t want your money. That is, as long as the boss isn’t around.

But we’re in the front, and the cooks are in the back. I didn’t ask to be stationed at the entrance. I don’t want to keep this gate our guard this store.

Sometimes we see our Mexican visitors arrive, the ones that shouldn’t have to pay, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we can pretend not to notice, sometimes we can’t. But when they see us see them, they always come to the register, they know those are the rules, the informal creed of Atlas Café. This isn’t a free for all, there has to be rules. (Does their have to be rules?)

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