Eat the Damn Cake

Because I loved Fraylie’s ability to write gorgeously and wryly about transitioning between college and the rest of life (see her last post here), I invited her back. We’re experimenting with the idea of making a regular place here for her on ETDC. Here are some of her thoughts on coffee shops:

David Attenborough, the celebrated voice of great nature documentaries, would probably enjoy narrating the interior life of the coffee shop.  Think of this:

The young male, upon sniffing the woody perfume of the approaching female, arches his neck in common cafe battle stance.  He mops a ring of coffee from the oak table to make his territory more inviting.  She, aroused, ruffles her collar and enters his domain.

I used to think of these narratives all the time.  Coffee shops were only half about studying and good drinks.  More importantly, coffee shops were one hundred percent about making eyes.  Let me explain.

Back in high school, my friends and I discovered a quirky online comic called Questionable Content, written by what we thought was a fellow snarky-nerdy compatriot of weird humor.  His characters worked in a coffee shop, played poor covers of Arcade Fire songs and slept around in a general malaise of nonchalance or total neurosis.  At seventeen, this seemed cool.  I wondered, “Could this Mecca of total hipster independence exist in the real world?”

Coffee of Doom, the comic’s central coffee shop, is loosely based on a Northampton spot called The Haymarket.  In typical coffee shop fashion, The Haymarket is a petri dish of averted eyes, wayward glances and coy smiles.  After enrolling at Hampshire College, a twenty-minute drive from Northampton, I realized that this coffee comedy actually existed.

The Haymarket resembles the entrance to a gilt bathhouse or Gaston Bachelard’s dimly lit wet dream: a spatial treasure trove of knick knacks, plants, paintings and, oh yeah, coffee.  (And it’s great coffee too, in case you’re looking for a plug.)  A few townies somnambulate around the arched entrance, asking for quarters or predicting the weather with limp gestures.  The music is moody like a rainy afternoon.

I, like the other pilgrims of Hampshire College, often came to town to hang around The Haymarket.   We brooded over important looking books and made eyes at the other handsome intellectuals doing the same thing.  For lack of a better word, the situation was comic.

The modes of symbolic interaction inside the Haymarket were nothing short of a microcosmic Shakespearean comedy of errors.  Wandering eyes made palpable trajectories. I could easily watch others watch me watching the sleepy-eyed, Deleuze-reading man who crossed and uncrossed his cowboy boots at uneven intervals.  People paid more attention to these moments than they did to their important looking texts.  But nobody was supposed to talk about it.

During college, this seemed appropriate, as I was studying sociological theory and self righteously applying it to my otherwise boring social situations.  This was an exercise in creating meaning based on small social cues. I read books at The Haymarket because I liked translating overlooked moments.  The space was the quintessence of my imagined coffee shop culture: creating knowledge by seeing and being seen.

Duane Michals, capturing the photographic reality of small moments.

It took a year of post-graduation reality checking to never care to step foot in The Haymarket again. This is when I internally started referring to The Haymarket as Coffee Of Doom, its comic counterpart.

The most annoying thing about living in your college town after graduation is when a bright-eyed undergraduate asks you what you’re doing with your life when you clearly do not know the answer.  When this happens, I sense that these students want me to assuage them with progressive tales of adventure and life changing decisions. But mostly, I just wish they’d send a postcard to someone who has moved on from the space of their undergraduate career.

Where I once thrillingly enjoyed the prospect of furtive glances and intellectualizing everyday life, I now realize how implicitly college that was.  And it’s actually quite a painful thing to grin through your teeth and tell people that life is great. That you’re really “finding yourself” in Northampton, and that your mediocre service industry job is just an island stop on the way to the exciting continent of graduate school where, again, you will study why microcosmic social situations are so indicative of the human condition.  And maybe you will find another faraway coffee shop to have the same interactions in, all over again.

This symbolic interaction happens everywhere because people are obsessed with making meaning out of little things.  Microcosmic investigations become macrocosmic realities. Objects and spaces don’t have a sincere reality until we imbue it with such – and that’s what makes us human and our spaces actualized.  But when you’re not too happy with your own reality, spaces that are voyeuristic and filled with curious people are not always good spaces.

Back when I was confident in my self-imposed role at the coffee shop, “intellectual voyeur wanting to be seen,” it was okay to have my coffee in a thick white mug while crossing and uncrossing my ankles.  But now that I’m not too sure of what to call myself, I don’t want others to catch a whiff of that anxiety.  These days, if I really want coffee, I get it to go.

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Un-roast: Today, I’m particularly fond of my pale skin.  It feels lovely in the warm spring sun!

Check out a new guest post on Skipping School (I renamed Un-schooled!), which raises a big question about homeschooling. Is it elitist?