home away from home

There’s something about coffee shops. I’m completely in love with them. I love the atmosphere; I love the coffee; I love the smell; I love the music; I love the people; I love the conversations; I love the distracted solitude. I love that I’m a true coffee drinker and always take it black. I came here initially tonight because I wanted to get to the internet since my apartment doesn’t allow that for the time being. But I’ve finished what I came to do and I just can’t leave. In one hour, I’ve watched a child - with a bike helmet on - search through all the cushions on the couches and chairs, seen a black man, a pregnant Asian woman, a Latina mother with two small children, heard comments about how (theoretically) this coffee shop only wants the children of their owners to patronize them and not the community, about a recent break-up with an ex of 4 years, and seen 3 people with books and computers, including myself. Bliss.

I love that I can come here and do whatever I want. I can sit here and study, write papers, write novellas of thoughts and comments and analyses to and about myself or others, blog, bring friends for good conversation…I love that it can be a place of extreme productivity or complete mind-numbingness or of deepening friendships all at the same time, and have all things be a form of complete relaxation and stress relief. In the same bag I put my new favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov, (1) and my current theological reads, Judaism Despite Christianity (2) (which unfortunately just had to be returned to the library), and A More Radical Gospel (3). The three are drastically different, and pull me in wildly antithetical directions, but all end up at the same place at the same time.

I love the people I meet. Most recently there was a man who was from Miami, taught 6th graders in Boston, and then went to Chicago to study law and just took the bar exam. There was another who taught high school history and was a football coach, joined the military, and was in Alaska for a while with them. There are the graduate students who are working and say hello and smile intriguingly at me every time I walk in…yet never say another word. There was another who wrote textbooks for computer programming...and looked like my high school biology teacher. And there are those I see almost every time I walk in – yet I never know their name until virtually the last time I’m there.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of coffee shops, but if they were still alive, I would find them and kiss them. There is really nothing on this earth to compare with the utopia found here. Maybe the shops in Germany will be just as wonderful.

(1) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(2) Letters between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig
(3) Gerhard O. Forde