Eureka!

Friday afternoon, 1/20/12: First Cupping

2012-01-20T23:49:00.005-05:00

-that is, coffee cupping...location: the Warehouse
-pregame with Primo hoagies
-first, a taste of Pure Black, sweetened and once-pressed: top taste is undesirable; bottom taste is wonderfully grainy and all coffee; sugar is consistent from top to bottom; SN likes a punch in the face
-the demise of Robinson, our Haitian coffee ambassador: mob politics with reactionary, old men; we will dig deep into Haiti
-Beasts Ride Bicycles: A children's book ft. Bird Rider & Robusta Dude
-pizza: Naples vs Rome; semolina vs no semolina; chef vs. the 8th generation Russian pizza connoisseur
-where was the coffee spoon? (a) not a coffee spoon-- a drug spoon (b) in Serge's tool box; (c) not a drug spoon-- a pooper scooper; (d) Bryan stole it to clean up after his new dog (e) Bryan has Flyers tickets
-pods: ever-widening screens from 54 to 58mm in diameter; they are evolving, and so must we; new packaging-- silver and sleek
-redefining "direct trade": buying directly from the children who stick the parchment around each bean

The cupping itself was a neat experience. Elliotte, Ben and I-- three baristas who had never been to such an event-- sat side by side on the bench across the table from JP, while he stood like an eccentric professor, waving around his hands until one of his unusually thick fingers got sliced by his own Pure Black twist-off cap and began bleeding profusely. As casual as his manner was, he had the air of knowledge about him as he spoke. He was in his element, talking about a subject that he had spent hundreds of thousands of hours of his life thinking about, studying, breathing, creating, tasting, drinking, dreaming and doing. Eventually, most of the office staff drifted in and joined the meeting, hanging around the perimeter of the gorgeous wooden conference table, but not quite sitting at it. Even Tobin, the accountant, popped his head in for a brief moment to say hello.

After the cupping of the first Panamanian bean, the cups-- rounded, white bowl types-- were washed, redosed with the second El Salvadorian beans, refilled with boiling water, and re-aligned in a straight line down the long bench table. We steeped and slurped. The surprise was that, as light as the El Sal was roasted (lighter than the Panamanian bean), it was much more pleasantly citrus-y and smooth than the sharply acidic Panamanian bean. Part of the reason for this seemingly paradoxical result may have been the inconsistent grind level of the two beans. JP suggested a darker roast for the sharply acidic Panamanian bean; Chris, the roaster, disagreed with an immediacy and certainty that impressed me.

We fell into discussions with our neighbors. From the right side of the room, I caught a tip from Chris: slurp a spoonful of the Panamanian, let it sit in your mouth, and the orange-iness will hit you like a bus. It hit me suddenly that "citrusy" did not necessarily entail "acidic". From the left side of the room, Patrick sat at the end of the table with a ph meter dipped into his cup of coffee, as focused as a doctor listening in on his stethoscope to the beating of a heart. He listed the following acidity levels for the sake of comparison: stomach juice-- 1; lemon juice-- 2 to 3; Panama-- 5.28; El Salvador-- ? A point emphasized and re-emphasized by the chef of the house was that the beans for the cupping were roasted lightly enough to expose the faults of the bean, but also dark enough to expose the beauty of the bean. He dipped his hand into the pile of roasted beans, lifted and let them run through his fingers as he spoke of their beauty.

Afterward, I, along with Ben and Patrick hopped in for a ride back with Ell (the other El), who dropped us off at our respective homes. We found ourselves driving into Headhouse Square. What a beautiful place at dusk. Hoagies for dinner.

How Many Cups?

2012-01-11T23:45:00.013-05:00

This evening at the Rittenhouse cafe, I served three girls decked out in head scarves and bedazzling outfits from Forever 21. The one in pink was from Baghdad; the other two from Tunisia and Morocco.

The three bedazzling ladies sat down at a table in the corner in front of the bar and began giggling like schoolgirls as Bart fell yet again into his hysterical "tragic laughter" state-- the one in which you can't tell if he is laughing or weeping. I was sure he was actually weeping this time until he pointed at Pedro and said that he was "very funny".

I had to agree with Bart this evening: Pedro was very funny. Today, Pedro chose the wrong time to trash talk to me and ended up with cappuccino all over his jeans. That was very funny. Then later during clean-up, we started swinging between the bar counters for fun, and in the blink of an eye, he was on the ground. That was also very funny, but only because he was unhurt.

I introduced the Deaf Elephant to both him and John this evening. They threw cups at me in return. Then they gave an observing customer a cup to throw at me too. Hence, I had three cups thrown at me today total. Paper cups, not the ceramics from Italy.

Day 10 of the Year 2012

2012-01-10T23:13:00.003-05:00

I followed the full-ish moon to work; orange lilies lit up my workspace.

-what are ram horns? handlebar moustache turned upside-down; equivalently: what is a handlebar moustache? ram horns turned upside-down
-at the espresso bar: a calligraphy session with the two young, bubbly doctors-to-be; a discussion on the science of baking cheez-its with a crossword puzzling pastry chef
-a word in the English language with three of the same letter in a row: (a) does not exist; (b) "oooh!"
-Day 2 of this week's challenge: go to a dance class every day for 7 days straight. Screw the healthy balance; I embrace my obsession.
-I saw the date "January 8, 2012" printed on an online article; it took me a couple seconds to realize that this date was not in the science fiction-y future. Woah...From now on, we're livin' in the future!

Day 6 of the Year 2012

2012-01-07T02:12:00.000-05:00

-crashed a classics conference at the Marriott: in which I discovered chaîne opératoire and listened to a scholar talk about Planet of the Apes
-with Mini Millar, built a cuppyramid, and then an even bigger cuppyramid, and then an even bigger cuppyramid with an alligator moat which was then destroyed by the longest yell in history: in which I was all the while fascinated by the little engineer's obsession with the one particular form, which he built over and over again, utterly in the zone; in which the little engineer christened me "Crane-kay"
-inflamed by acer negundo, aka, box elder tree, whose wood turns brilliant streaks of red when attacked by borers like the ambrosia beetle
-took Juniper Street, the back alley route home; considered that calligraphy, flower arranging, and ornate sculpting of building facades require a similar mindset in their undertaking
-overdosed on darling clementines and put Mozart piano sonatas on repeat

2012-01-06T01:32:00.000-05:00

Today, Bart told me that Russian was the language of Hell.

Osama, smarty that he is, asked: "What's the language of heaven?"

"Hebrew," was the prompt reply of the Messianic Schizophrenic Jew.

"What about Arabic?" countered Osama, who is Palestinian.

"Uhhh huh huh..."

"Uhhh huh huh..." echoed Rad from behind the bar.

For once, Bart was the less crazy of the crazy customers I encountered today at work. Oh La Colombe.

With regards to the crazier one: When one customer pisses you off, but a half-dozen others plus your co-workers back you up, you come out feeling good about humanity despite that one crazy loon. I feel buoyed. What I don't have in money, I have in friends. Nothing to complain about.

And speaking of...what does money smell like?

Day 2 of the Year 2012

2012-01-02T21:34:00.000-05:00

A day off...

-watched Titanic at 6 in the morning
-tried not to weep over the fleeting nature of love and life
-broke my fast with nachos; ate grapes for dinner

Day 1 of the Year 2012:

2012-01-01T21:34:00.000-05:00

-wake up, shower, and put on a tuxedo dress and black tie; but forget on purpose the creepy moustache
-serve coffee to dozens at the City Hall cafe; escape before the mummers get too obnoxious
-serve coffee to hundreds at the Rittenhouse cafe; chase them out at the closing hour with '90s techno hits
-take Broad Street path home and wonder at the chaos on the streets: trash everywhere, everywhere the stench of alcohol, drunken revelers on foot in droves; everywhere the flashing of blue and red cop lights
-come home, put food into stomach, decompress; consider watching Titanic; I cannot explain this sudden urge, nor shall I try to fight it

New Glasses

2011-12-23T05:46:00.001-05:00

Good morning, world! The world is clear. Smooth wine red and sky blue frames circle the cuts of glass through which I see you now.

Clearance

2011-11-30T18:04:00.001-05:00

After nearly two months of attempting to understand, accommodate, and excuse our neighbors across the street from the Dilworth cafe, the three of us who were working this morning stood outside the shop just before opening, as the sky grew light. B. held a cigarette in his hand, A. a mug of drip coffee, and I a single espresso. We stared at the empty cement plaza across the street which, up until one o'clock this morning, had held dozens and dozens of tents occupied by a peculiar, hygienically-challenged alien race.

As I had rounded the corner to Dilworth Plaza this morning, I had been greeted by an incredible sight of what appeared to be the entire Philadelphia police force surrounding this former tent city. Police cars lined up ass to nose, buses filled with riot police, a helicopter in the sky, workers (surprisingly not dressed in hazmat suits) clearing up the last scraps of tent and the last bit of the 27 tons of trash that had accumulated since October 6th. But not a single one of those smelly squatters remained.

The pastry man, along with the first two of our customers of the day showed up, so I headed in first. The other two followed suit soon after. A. did a quick bathroom check, dusted off his hands, and declared optimistically, "Yo! From now on, bathroom gonna be OK!" (Translation: No more clogged toilets, blood on the floor, overflowing trash, extreme BO, or lines that run longer than the line for coffee!)

What have I to say at the end of all this? I have learned that whoever you are, your politics means nothing to me. It says nothing to me automatically about what kind of person you are, or how you treat others. Politics is so superficial. It's so easy to hold up a set of political beliefs on a sandwich board and pretend that it defines you in any way, but now I know better. Don't bother telling me whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, investment banker or starving artist, of the 99% or the 1%. In my shop, I will see for myself whether your are courteous and kind and know how to flush a toilet.

My Community

2011-11-30T02:08:00.002-05:00

Today, I met a girl named Messiana who taught Jazz-U-Up classes at a local gym. I told her she should go by 'Messi'. "Why?" she asked. I told her it would make her famous and that she would even find her name graffiti-ed all over the walls of Northern Iraq. How can she not go by this name?

Mila came in today with a crown of flowers in her hair. I miss her coming into the shop in her pajamas and dangling from her tummy over the chair, experimenting with flight. Later, Gilda came in with her daughter to drop off biscotti. I could not decide who was cuter-- the mother or the daughter. I bought butterfly stickers at CVS after work for these girls and all the other adorables that come into the shop. Too many to count; too cute for words.

Last but not least, I learned a new word today: boughetto. Something or someone that pretends to be rich and fancy but is actually ghetto. Or is it the other way around: someone who pretends to be ghetto but is actually bougie? A point-of-interest: both the parent word (bourgeouis) and the derived word (boughetto) carry the connotation of phoniness, of pretending to be "better" than you really are.

I continue to try to make my customers feel comfortable at the bar. This is key to becoming a great barista. Does he look harried? Tired? Overenergetic? Sad? Distraught? Bored? People come up to the bar in various mental states, so you can't treat them all the same. However, you can aim to make each one feel comfortable as they order their coffee.

In the evening, I put on my alter ego attire-- a leotard, tights, and ballet slippers-- and headed over to ballet class. Along the way, I ran into the Red-Eye Winker (his drink is a red-eye, and he gives a friendly wink every time he orders). We both stood under our giant black umbrellas and doffed our imaginary hats at each other. He's just as silly as I am!

What this job does not give me in dollars, it gives me a hundred times over in the sense of community. When you have a whole community of friendly faces to run into in the streets of your neighborly city, nothing can bother you for too long.

2011-10-13T18:04:00.000-04:00

As a La Colombe barista, I have a front row view of the tents occupying Dilworth Plaza, 6 hours a day, 4 days a week. It is interesting to be caught in in the middle of this movement physically and ideologically. Our second shop being located in the city's financial and government district, many of my "clients"-- the people to whom I serve their daily coffee-- are the very people whom the protesters are fighting against. I can't say whether they are part of the top wealthy 1%, but for sure they are not what I would call "middle class". Of course, our clientele is not limited to those who make banks, but they do make up a noteworthy portion.

Lately, however, we have had a great influx of clientele from the tents. In the beginning, they came in primarily to clean themselves up and piss in a proper toilet, but upon realizing that this was our livelihood, they started checking out our coffee as well. The exchange is often rather strange and awkward-- they come in already apologetic, perhaps holding up a cup they had purchased earlier in the day, head toward the bathroom asking in expression more than words if it's okay to use it. Some just head directly to the bathroom without making eye contact. Some act like normal customers and human beings, which is a welcome relief.

Yesterday, a mother took her daughter into the bathroom. I heard water running, then the hand dryer blowing, then suddenly a scream that carried throughout the cafe. For a millisecond, I was extremely worried, then realized the little girl was screaming with delight at how funny the air felt as it blow-dried her hair. I wondered if she was one of the children caught up in this movement unwittingly, forced to live in a plastic playhouse among the tents while their parents alternately stand proudly with their signs and ideologies, then turn around and break up tearful fights among one another's babies.

This evening, 5 minutes before closing time, an occupier gave a purposeful start when I offered her plastic cups for the water she had requested. She then proceeded to give an unsolicited explanation for why she "made a face" when I offered her the cups. "You see, I'm a person who recycles all the time..." I didn't need to hear this, and I can't say that I took it with grace. I have no patience for self-righteous, condescending, holier-than-thou attitudes, and it made me want to take a bulldozer over all those tents out there. It took me a few minutes in the back kitchen to remember that neither she, nor the mother with the screaming child, nor the awkward sidlers wholly represented the population of Occupy Philly.

For the most part, from poor students to the multimillionaires, our regular customers appear to acknowledge the occupation, but not bother themselves much over it. They have their own lives to lead which is to study, work, take care of their children, and other such responsibilities. As for me, as an American citizen officially categorized as being below the poverty line, I am caught between wanting to support a movement that fights against the injustices of Corporate America, and being wholly unable to identify with the type of people who are actually involved in the movement at the grassroots level.

Big Picture

2011-09-19T17:21:00.000-04:00

Life is bigger than a Netflix price-hike. It is bigger, even, than the biggest argument or most long-standing grudge. Every problem comes with a choice: to care or not to care. It is a hazard to care too much, as much as it is a hazard to care too little. There is no right or wrong approach; just choice and consequence. Impressions are far from immutable: given enough time, most things are forgotten, fade into unimportance, are altered, or replaced. Evolution is inevitable for anything that is not trapped in some literal or figurative amber. The blue of a blue sky is never felt with such intensity as when change is imminent-- a move, a voyage, or on a dramatic scale, a death. Clouds are a beautiful, amazing planetary phenomena-- acres and acres of crimped and wispy shapes scattered across that incredible blue, reflected in the glass of the tallest city buildings, soaring out from between drab and dingy abandoned structures, and illuminated gold by the rising morning sun. To think of clouds and stars is a good and faithful reminder of the briefness of one's time on this planet, a reminder of the relative unimportance of most things we consider to be important. Answers, explanations, curiosities, the beautiful, the strange and the wondrous are readily discovered when the mind is fully present and ready to receive: be still, look, listen, consider the stars, and suddenly, the blue sky will leave you breathless.

A Motivation for Making Images

2011-09-12T20:42:00.001-04:00

“For Caravaggio, making images is a way of focusing the mind. To paint something is to isolate it for the purposes of contemplation.” ~Andrew Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred & Profane

Whimsical Meandering

2011-09-06T23:52:00.001-04:00

Carter is tiny, and bald, with the most expressive eyebrows; she must be the happiest baby in the world. Does she know this? Her and her mother's daily visit to the coffeeshop makes my day. What else makes my day? Working with G makes me realize that you can never run out of things to say about poop and farts. This is amazing.

Ballet today: Every class at Symmetry is a craft. The Lakme Flower Duet beckons me into class from the foyer. I try my best to commit each exercise to memory. It is surprisingly doable this second time. I think that I don't like to smile in ballet class. To me, ballet is a noble and stoic art form and it seems incongruous and not genuine to paste on a smile for an imagine audience. Did the Spartan soldiers smile in warfare, rigid training and weary marches?

After class, I skip out on pointe class in order to write out each exercise from memory into my sketchbook. I feel very much like a student, a very serious student. I am driven by the knowledge that nothing good lasts forever; I am in a rush to become an independent ballerina. As I write out my notes, I suddenly consider trying to become a real ballerina. Later I wonder what does this mean, to be a "real" ballerina? Is performance what separates the student from the professional? But I already perform in the streets. Perhaps I am already a ballerina, and I have made the world my stage. Ooh! An idea blooms...A long terms project...every year a new stage...this year Russia...next year...

There is hope yet for my studio.

After ballet, I stop by the bookstore on the way home and read Harold and the Purple Crayon at the low wooden table. Oh Harold! He reminds me of Carter, so bald and whimsical. He creates his own world just like I create mine.

A Forgotten Feat

2011-08-22T22:07:00.000-04:00

Ha! On this day last year, I made my first latte leaf. Thanks for the reminder, facebook. What I have learned since then is that:

--there is more than one pouring technique that works

--the way a barista pours his latte art is somewhat reflective of his personality

--the push that urges the foam out is the same physical mechanism as when the car comes to a sudden, abrupt halt and your body continues, or is thrown forward

An amazing occurrence at work today: I inherited a turtle ring from a stranger. "Can you write me into your will for that ring?" I joked. A few more jokes and comments about the ring's origin, then a slight hesitation, and suddenly she was taking it off and giving it to me. The last time I experienced this sort of generosity from strangers was many times over in Kurdistan, when mothers and grandmothers would give me the scarf off their heads, and their little girls would give me cheap jewelry they'd bought at the bazaar.

This time, the gift is not so cheap-- an original from the Urban Outfitter headquarters, given to her by her ex, and now passed on to her barista. The particulars: Its silver head and legs wobble, and its back is studded with emeralds. It fits too loosely on all the fingers of my left hand, but once squeezed past my freakishly large right thumb knuckle, it remains snug and safe. Dr. Gashu saw the entire scene while he waited to order his daily cappuccino. "Did you guys really just meet?" Yup...yes indeed.

A funny occurrence at work today: I wore my new newsgirl hat with a sidelong bow, which I picked up at a Payless in New York City on Saturday, and it drew several independent comments about Chairman Mao. I tell them I am getting into the spirit of the Communist Era, in preparation for my trip to Russia. I realize I know next to nothing about Chairman Mao. So much to learn, so much to read, so little time to do it all.

The dynamic at the cafe today was strange: eerily quiet for the first hour or two, despite the gorgeous, perfect 80-degree weather outside, then finally the buzz of conversation began as a couple of regulars congregated in front of the bar. Behind the bar, I experienced one of the smoothest operations yet as I worked the register and John manned the machines for the first three hours.

Jeremiad: A Debbie Downer On Steroids, in Writing

2011-08-17T07:37:00.002-04:00

A jeremiad is a "long, literary work which bitterly laments the state of society and its morals, and moreover prophesies its imminent downfall."

Assignment #6: Write a jeremiad. Preliminary exercise to this assignment: get seriously pissed off.

Pesto Roots

2011-08-02T21:05:00.007-04:00

I'm making OG pesto tonight! Ingredients for OG pesto:

(a) pistillum (Latin)=>pestel (Old French)=>pestle (English).
(b) pistillum (Latin)=>pestare(Italian)=>pesto (Italian/English).
(c) Originally, a mortar and pestle was used to make pesto.

Note: The word pestle came before pesto since the former had to exist to make the latter. But they originate from the same Latin root.

Update from the kitchen:

The smell wafting out of the mortar is divinely basil-ic. The smashed basil swimming in its own juices looks like a home-made facial. I would like to slather it all over my face, but I shall resist.

Slow Sundays

2011-07-24T17:38:00.001-04:00

Sundays at the new cafe are like a La Colombe playgroup for kids 3 and under. Today I caught an origami bird for one of them (the one that comes in every morning barefoot, hair disheveled, and still in her pajamas). Her mother loved it more than she did. Sparrows are deceptively sweet looking; in reality very vicious creatures who attack butterflies and damage their wings. Sundays at the new cafe is also like watching the Nature Channel through the huge ceiling to floor windows. As much as I love to work mindlessly making and serving coffee, I enjoy the slow Sundays for now. The new cafe is an airy haven of peace for families and visitors from out of town, here for conferences and weddings. Also notes of worth from this morning's shift: a chair sitting instead of being sat on, a wounded spider who came into the air-conditioned cafe to pass the last hour of its life, and the dear Ethiopian doctor who had been on my mind lately for the lack of his presence.

Cold-Brew Coffee

2011-07-14T14:28:00.002-04:00

A couple weeks ago, I decided to jump on the toddy bandwagon and experiment with cold-brewed coffee. I soaked coarsely ground Haitian Blue Forest beans in my French Press overnight, then pressed it twice and poured the resulting liquid into a pitcher. I let it sit in my fridge for the next few days mostly because I forgot about it. Too many things going on.

Now that I am moving house, I re-discovered it while in "throw-away mode" and finally tasted it-- straight up, without diluting it with water. I caught a whiff of it just before the first sip, and frowned-- not because it smelled bad, but because it smelled oddly familiar. After a couple more sips, I realized why, and here's my initial verdict on cold-brewed coffee concentrate:

It tastes like a mild form of the Korean/Chinese herbal medicine called hanyak. I used to hate that stuff growing up. They really shouldn't tell kids that what they're drinking contains deer antlers, tortoise shells, and dried up insects. I much prefer this milder coffee variety, though it might not contain the same healing powers.

Baked Ziti on the Fly

2011-07-09T08:40:00.000-04:00

What is "Baked Ziti On The Fly"? It is the taking of the technique used in making traditional baked ziti, and adapting it to whatever ingredients you have on hand. One must not plan to make Baked Ziti on the Fly; one must become inspired to make it On The Fly, preferably at 7 in the am when the house is still quiet.

-sauce: Leonardo e Roberto's garlic basic parmesan dipping oil, which your roommate bought at a flower show over a year ago and left in the house when she moved to Nashville; LeR's sundried tomato dipping oil; half cup of milk for some semblance of 'sauciness'; minced garlic; salt; onion powder; crushed dried chili pepper from Indian grocery; an egg. Saute garlic and oils first; cool mixture with cold milk before tossing in the egg; toss in extra garlic if you are of Korean descent
-penne (meaning 'feather' or 'quill') pasta leftover from previous pasta cooking endeavor (vodka penne), cooked less than al dente
-frozen broccoli for extra nutrition; toss in with boiling penne
-old pancetta wrapped in foil that you scrutinize and end up tossing into the bin because old meat is a health risk
-fresh rosemary; forget to put this in
-order in the pan: cooking spray, pasta, sauce, extra onion powder; parm cheese to heart's content, bread crumbs; bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until it looks and tastes good to you; forget to cover with aluminum foil
-use other baked ziti cheeses (mozzarella, ricotta, etc.) and spaghetti sauce only if you have them on hand
-mourn the lack of sriracha sauce

Counting My Blessings

2011-07-08T22:28:00.000-04:00

Today was a good day. It thundered. It rained; it poured. I got to work with my barista mentor and we actually got to hustle a few times, though the line was never anywhere near what it is at the old shop...yet. I bantered with an SNL comedian. I got to make lovely latte leaves and nerdy math jokes to the young professionals who walked in wearing graph-shirts. I fell asleep in mid-afternoon to the sound of thunder clapping and rain dripping down to my bathroom floor. I slipped of course, but did not fall. I got to wear my purple rain boots. I got to pay my toddler friend a visit in her carseat. The car door opened. "Elsa, look what daddy found! Who is this Elsa?" The toddler spoke my name and kicked her feet excitedly in the air. I'm honored to be part of her relatively vast, yet limited vocabulary. I got to go to a Friday afternoon ballet class and have a real talk with my ballet mentor. Half-price sandwiches and a funny book at Capogiro's. And still the rain comes down hard, pelting and rushing. I get to be inside on a night like this. The scar on my right eyelid is healing nicely; I no longer look like a character out of Starship Enterprise, or whatever that show was called. I was never a tried-and-true trekky.

Parnassus on Wheels

2011-07-07T17:20:00.119-04:00

"But books aren't a substantial world after all, and every now and then we get hungry for some closer, more human relationships." ~Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

One could replace the word "books" with "ballet" and that sentence would neatly encapsulate the conclusion I arrived at after months of being in love with ballet. There was a time when I believed adamantly that I needed nothing else. After a time, however, I found I was using it as a means to fill the void left by my solitary ways. As I came to realize, one type of love cannot replace another. There is love of objects, love of ideals, and then there is love of other beings like myself, and only one of these three can reciprocate.

Happiness: When I am working, I am brimming with energy. When I'm lying in bed, I am restless. When little Elsa comes for her daily visit, my day brightens. When I am practicing Russian, my day feels less wasted. I could migrate to a remote region of the Himalayas and meditate on a mountainside for the next five years, but it is incomprehensible to me that such a distance from the world and its inhabitants would bring me internal peace, but perhaps this is so because I am un-Enlightened. On the other hand, when I am in the ballet studio, sweating and working the muscles, I feel happier and more centered and focused. I feel we are born to work and sweat. I get excited when I'm making big plans for the future. I live for the presumably greater future. Happiness is associated with peace, yet all the striving that brings me these good feelings is rife with hard work and fatigue. And good feelings never last forever. I can't lie in bed forever. Sometimes not even for a normal period of sleep. But after days and days of restlessness and striving, all that weight will come down on me and I can finally sleep and sleep and sleep. Who decided that a normal day cycle would last 24 hours? Neither my brain nor my body functions at such regular intervals.

However, regularity may be exactly the medicine I need. It occurs to me that the rhythm achieved behind the bar by automated, repetitive, coordinated action could be achieved on a larger scale and bring me a similar sense of happiness outside of work. Getting into the swing of things on a larger scale. I think this is the idea behind ritual: repetitive actions that bring about a certain dynamic and meaning to daily life. Yet, I think the greatest happiness comes from when that dynamic is shared with another human being. Ballet is not enough, a career is not enough, books are not enough because as stated above, none of these activities, no matter how much they are driven by ideals and passion, can reciprocate basic human emotions. I am, without a doubt, a social animal. Not everyone is.

Musings of a Barista

2011-07-02T08:09:00.001-04:00

I got six shifts this week! Time to rest up so I can be present with my customers. A year later, I still have to remind myself to take it easy, take it slow. I'm too much like a tornado...too many crazy weekend shifts that made me think that that was the norm. Watching the new hires who work so slowly and methodically, I realize that this is where I can get better, where I can develop an eye for detail.

A year into the coffee business, I find myself wondering how much of my views on the politics and philosophies surrounding the coffee industry are my own, and how much are those of my beloved company. Most of the coffee philosophy that I hear from my bosses seem utterly sensible. They are of the old world of coffee: when it was just a cup of joe, not the Holy Grail of Josephus; when an espresso was an elegant affair, not a cosmic explosion; when options were available, but not overwhelming. There is such a thing as too many choices.

As well, I don't believe in putting on airs where airs don't belong. Coffee enhanced my life a thousand-fold when it was introduced to me through this barista job. It gave me ritual-- an act that develops meaning through repetition--, it gave me an appreciation for the complexities of taste, and it attuned me to the possibilities of beauty contained in ingestible products-- beauty contained in a cup. Yet, as much as coffee has given me this past year, to me, it is still a product of the Earth and not a nectar of the gods, and for me to treat and serve it as such would be pure hyperbole and downright pretentious.

As a barista, I have made espresso a regular part of my daily life. I take a shot before almost every shift, partly so I can know my product and develop a palate over time, and partly for the sake of ritual. This is to say that I do believe the nuances exist, but number one: they are detectable by the human senses only to an extent, and that extent varies with each individual, can be developed, but takes time to develop, and number two: the ability to detect the nuances and describe them with flair has become a great big show of (mostly false) intellect, which I don't particularly care for. I did not leave the stuffy, recondite world of academia only to enter another high-brow, elitist coffee-stained ivory tower. Making coffee is a craft full of aesthetics and nuances. What it is not: a high art that is comprehensible only to the very learn-ed and designed to alienate the masses. As a barista at La Colombe, I am happy to work for a company that does its best to tamp down such high-brow inclinations. What I hear from my boss-- in his albeit brash and theatrical way-- aligns with my own internal inclination towards simplicity and down-to-earthiness.

What else, what else? Coffee gave me a rich history to study, a field for the observation of human nature in a most interesting setting, and best of all, it gave me great co-workers. Of all the people I have met through this job, I have found the ones on my side of the bar to be the most interesting to study, perhaps because I have the privilege of working alongside them in such close quarters. If you are stuck in a tiny room with one other person for 6 hours at a time, and moreover are working in concert with them, it is difficult not to pick up on the deepest aspects of their character. But these are stories for a private audience.

As I stepped behind the register for the first time last June, I experienced for the first time rapid-fire service that put me in varying mental states from automaton to "there, but not really there". I experienced what it felt like to work as a team and fall into a rhythm that required less words and more eye contact and intuition to make it swing. I learned the importance of confidence and pride in one's work. I learned from the best-- by watching my colleagues-- the ones I call the "Classic Crew"-- and picking out the best aspects of each of their work-habits and trying to make them my own. I've learned that even behind this bar, we are not immune to disagreement, tension, competition, and the usual bullshit that surrounds work settings, and it doesn't matter whether it is mostly guys or mostly gals. Each gender has his or her own way of manifesting irritating behaviors and creating "drama". However, if the proper measures are taken, this job has the most uncanny ability to mask the negatives and bring out the greatest aspects of a barista's personality. I think I believe this anyway. I have faith.

Going back to the issue of coffee philosophy, what is coffee to me, a server of this prized and ubiquitous substance? It is in its spirit of communion, a drink that brings people together for conversation with ease, efficiency, and elegance; in its spirit of solitude, a drink that brings comfort to cold, sleepy mornings, or even to hot afternoons and evenings.

What Kinds of People Do You Enjoy Meeting?

2011-06-21T10:04:00.000-04:00

I like to meet people who know things that I don't know.
I also like to meet people who know things that I know.
As well, I like to meet people who want to know things that I know.
And lastly, I like to meet people who want to know things that I want to know.
Know what I mean?

The Expectations of Youth

2011-06-20T06:30:00.000-04:00

I learned yesterday that once you stop caring, that is when you have grown up. The reasons why you stop caring are very good-- to protect yourself from disappointment, or worse; to come to terms with a grim reality that repeatedly fails to live up to your expectations.

It is probably a smart move in terms of Darwinian fitness-- a defense mechanism similar to the turtle donning its shell over the course of evolution.

Apathy is a very grown up state of mind. Acceptance of "reality" and the "inevitable" is a grown up skill to acquire. On the other hand, trying again and again to make reality accept your own ideal-- that is youth. It is naive, and touching, and unfortunately a paradise lost for many...a paradise regained for some.

I learned this yesterday from watching a movie called Submarine.

Schedule Change

2011-05-29T23:09:00.001-04:00

Tonight marks the end of the Serbian-Korean weekend team at LC, for another major shift in scheduling is impending. I'm excited about the long-awaited opening of the new cafe, and the notion of fresh beginnings. However, sudden schedule shifts are always a bittersweet affair because one has to say goodbye to the camaraderie that has grown over the months of working side by side behind the bar. Will I be able to find the same sweet rhythm with the next person I end up working with? I wonder. I respond to myself in true "yes and no" fashion: I usually do find a sweet rhythm, but it is never the same one.

Russian "moy" versus "menya"

2011-05-29T12:17:00.000-04:00

Dear Angie,

Both "moy" and "menya" are translated as "my" in English. Here are two ways to think of how they are different:

(1) moy receives a noun (ie: it is an adjective), while menya receives a verb

(2) moy is a possessive pronoun (which can be further classified as either nominative or accusative), while menya is a personal pronoun (which can be further classified as either accusative or genitive).

Regards,

Angie

Sweet & Sour Encounter

2011-05-29T08:51:00.004-04:00

I woke up thinking about the baby that spit up on me yesterday. That's good luck, you know, to be spitted up on by a baby, especially one named after President Kennedy. I am destined for great things. Or a great thing. She had the teeniest nails and a toothless mouth that opened wide into a gaping, black triangle shape with soft corners. She could do amazing acrobatics with her tongue-- the tongue seems to be the easiest part of your body to control in the beginning.

The Tongue of the Enemy

2011-05-26T19:52:00.001-04:00

Today, I met an Italian-Albanian who knew 5 languages including Serbian. Learn the language of your enemy, is what his father had taught him, literally. But how likely is it that the enemy of the son will be the same as the enemy of his father? A lot can happen politically in a single generation. However, I've always wanted a reason to learn Japanese.

Two Days Before Opening

2011-05-26T19:30:00.006-04:00

I just pulled my first shot of espresso at the new cafe at 15th between Chestnut and Market Streets. We'll be doing a slow un-grand opening Saturday morning at 8 am. Until then, last minute tweaks are being made. The health inspector came by today and made her rounds. I watched as Andrew the Handrewman sanded down a rough edge, made measurements for extra metal linings, and installed shelves in the kitchen/office (strangely, the same space). Half of Andrew was Serbian, I learned. Coincidentally, I'd just read that morning of Mladic's arrest, and so upon mentioning this breaking bit of news, I got to hear a personal account of murder, nationlessness, religious schisms and the like in the south Slavic region.

"Serbians are rednecks," said Andrew. I could thoroughly believe that. I thought of my Serbian co-worker's untamed nature, and rapt accounts of his hunting expeditions like the time he got *this* close to a litter of baby foxes. The other half of Andrew was Mexican, which showed up in his dark wavy hair and tanned skin. In fact, the only hint in his features of his European ancestry was the color of his eyes-- a clear sea green like the color of the ceramics that will be served at the soon-to-open Chicago location. I thought it would be marvelous if the walls of the Chicago shop-- with the ostensible reason of matching the ceramics-- were painted the color of his eyes, and I told him so.

"The only problem with the green," he returned, "is that the wood floors pick up on the color of the walls." That was when I first noticed the slight orange glow of the blonde wood floor of our new cafe. Wow...I wondered how many times our future customers would cross these floors and never pick up on this subtle detail. I certainly would not have. Details...I needed to get better at noticing them.

I watched Doug from New York make some masterful cappuccinos on the new Marzocco espresso machine. It was time to get my ass to New York to get some training from him. I've gotten too complacent about making drinks I think. There is a difference between good and excellent in drink-making. When people talk about you in the following fashion: "I've had great cappuccinos from other baristas, but there's something about the way you make it..."; when people can't quite put their finger on why yours is so amazing, but they just know it when they drink it; when the quality of your drink is so good that it is elusive, that's when you've reached excellence as a barista. Until then, one is still in training.

"I can't wait to pick out the Table where we're going to sit every morning drinking our coffee." That was Gus.

"'The Table'?" I asked. "Ohhhh, the Table!"

It hadn't even occurred to me that the Table at the Rittenhouse cafe had been chosen. I'd never questioned how we had come to sit there every morning before opening, in the dark with only the kitchen light on, enjoying our cups of coffee and the last 15 minutes of peace before the onslaught. From my first morning shift, I'd always felt that those 15 minutes were the best part of the entire day. No matter how the day went, you were never going to reclaim the experience-- the same quiet, the same intimacy, and the same freshness felt from 6:45 to 7 am. By the time your shift ends, 6 hours later, you will feel like a completely different person-- ragged, expended, perhaps out of sync or angry at something or another, shirt stained with coffee, hair reeking of its aroma-- and that golden quarter hour will be as if it had never happened, as if it had been a lifetime away, even though it was only 6 hours ago.

"Yeah, don't choose the Table without me!" I reminded him as we parted ways, "I want to be there and help you choose!"

Placebo Schmacebo

2011-05-26T10:45:00.001-04:00

Caffeine is magical-- and I'm not saying that just because I'm a barista! A double shot espresso will bring me out of a morass of lethargy and pessimism to a rejuvenated bundle of optimism-- from a near-catatonic state of lassitude to a state of mental clarity and drive!...in a matter of minutes. Nothing short of black magic.

While working behind the bar, I often think of my kindergarteners. That is, the task of taking care of my grown up customers to their satisfaction often reminds me of taking care of my 5-year-olds (who will be going into grade 2 this fall-- oh my...and my grade 2's will be huge 5th graders--oh my...). Especially in the way some of them interrupt without consideration, feel wounded to the core when I accidentally skip past them in line (my bad!), and seek special attention of which I can only give so much at a time-- especially then I think of my kindergarteners. Sometimes, I see very little difference between those to whom I served an education, and those to whom I serve coffee. In both age groups, this sort of behavior is at once endearing and maddening.

Akin to the feeling I had at the end of the teaching year in Iraq, though to a lesser degree, is this feeling I have now that I will miss many of the faces I have come to know since last June when I served my first coffee at the flagship store at Rittenhouse Square. Though I will be working a mere 5 blocks away at our new Ritz-Carlton location, I know that 5 blocks in the city can be a great distance especially to the heavily habitual folks who frequent my coffeeshop. "People are creatures of habit," to quote my Serbian co-worker. They get the same drink every day for years. You can work there for years and memorize everyone's drinks, then leave for 2 years, come back, and that list of drinks will have undergone little alteration. Miss Julia will still get her cappuccino (and dress like Mrs. Peacock in the Billiard Room with the Candlestick), Miss Susanna her half-milk-half-coffee au lait, Fancy Nancy her mostly milk au lait, Mr. Koresh his red-eye, the three dark-haired men who get Americanos for "here" every day and linger for hours in solitude over their work, the silver-haired, suited gentleman who looks extraordinarily like Sean Connery and stands at the side of the bar every day drinking his espresso and giving off heady waves of his customized cologne from Paris, the younger man who also takes an espresso every day (and takes a regular drip coffee to-go as well), who aims to emulate the classiness of the Sean Connery espresso drinker, sexy Nataliya who gets a cappuccino in a paper cup every day between hairstyling sessions, the spinal surgery man who gets a double-cupped black coffee and a decaf for his pregnant wife, the parents of Elsa...and so on. The penniless artist will still be there laughing one minute and weeping the next, and you still won't be able to tell which is which because they will both still sound the same; old Bill will still come up to the bar and share with you random facts about high art and the same 4 phrases in Greek that he knows. The scraggly old woman will still sit alone in her corner scribbling code in the margins of her little notebook for hours on end. The other day, she was sitting right over the edge of the side of the bar, and so while pretending to clean, I leaned over and tried to see exactly what she was scribbling, but I couldn't make out anything sensible-- or perhaps I mean to say "sane". Christ...sometimes, I don't know how to feel about this time capsule nature of the shop-- whether to feel suffocated by its unflagging invariance, or adore it for its timelessness.

Yesterday after work, I bought groceries for my big cooking endeavor (vodka penne) and had to rest my arms on the way home. While sitting on a brick ledge in the hot sun, I saw one of my customers coming my way-- Joel, the very sweet Rittenhouse Market grocer who gets a cup to-go every day. We were neighbors, it turned out; he lived a mere two blocks away from my house. A short while later, he was giving me a tour of his very narrow and tall abode that was more like a treehouse than a house in the city. It had three stories with a narrow spiraling staircase that led to each one. The rooms were of modest size and the entire place had the air of an era gone by, nearly vanished or at most pushed into the peripheries and dusty, aging, slowly forgotten corners of this world, in this age of wireless and constant bombardment of high-tech noise. There was no wifi, no internet at all, no computer, no cell phone. What he did have was books and paintings. He was a local painter. On his walls hung huge canvases of industrial scenes around Philadelphia, some which no longer even exist. On the third floor was his work space and the walls in here were lined from top to bottom and side to side with hundreds of magazines-- the canary yellow spines of National Geographic filling one entire wall, another half of a wall filled by the thinner, taller ivory-colored spines of Life Magazine, some of which dated back to WWII, another half of a wall dedicated to art books and the other half of that wall stacked with the classics he had read in college-- Solzhenitsyn, Sartre, Steinbeck, Tolstoy. If you know me at all...

He had a cat and he arranged his food like a grocery store. On top of his fridge was a very orderly pyramid of canned soups. Next to this pyramid was a very orderly stack of Kashi brand cereal. He opened his freezer and I burst out laughing. The inside was packed with frozen tv dinners, all of the same brand-- the one with the bright orange colored box. His great (great-great?) grandfather had been in the grocery business. His uncle and several others in his family had also been painters. He was a man who faithfully carried on his family's traditions.

I walked out of his house with my groceries, a host of new impressions, and a new book called "The Road", by Cormac McCarthy. I walked the two blocks home and thought how curious it all was. I walked one block toward my house and waved to a a blue-eyed, cherub-haired man waiting at the wheels of his black car with his window rolled down. He was my next-door neighbor and another regular at my shop-- a connection I discovered 10 months after I had been serving him his double cappuccino every morning.

Free Books

2011-05-23T19:51:00.001-04:00

I'm giving away my books from now on after I read them (exceptions for reference-like books, epic tomes, and books with pretty pictures). Why? I do not like amassing too many things, so less than a month ago, I resolved to stop spending money on books, and to just read the ones I already own or ones lent to me. Well! Today, I just broke (read: shattered) that rule. So now I get to buy them, but must give them away after the reading.

It makes very little sense financially-- then again, I never claimed to have a good head for business. Quite the opposite, really. Existentially speaking (?), it makes me feel free...free from the bondage of money. When you do things for free, it means you can afford to. Although I am not rich, I am not dirt poor, and I can afford to do things here and there without worrying about how to get something green out of it. And besides, I like the idea of sharing/distributing my experiences in this way.

The Best Piss of My Waking Life

2011-05-21T09:23:00.000-04:00

It is May 21st and the sinners are still as alive as the saints!

Since I am alive to tell the story, here it is:

Have you ever sat on a toilet and thought, I wonder if this is a dream...? Well...let me backtrack. Yesterday, I came home from ballet and was so hungry that I ate an entire pineapple. A real one, not canned, that I had experimentally sliced up in the Vietnamese tradition before leaving for class. That baby was so ready ripe that it was starting to mold on the bottom, was as yellow as jaundice, and tasted sugary sweet.

The consumption of an entire pineapple left me immobilized on the couch. I'd had plans to go to a birthday party, and that plan was nixed. My roommates invited me to join them at a bar called Public House, but I had to say no thanks. All I could do was lie on the couch and watch a Flight of the Conchords video and imagine an entire pineapple sitting in my stomach.

Eventually, I went upstairs to hit the shower and go to mattress (for those of you who don't know it, I don't have a bed-- just a twin-sized mattress, and just recently acquired bedsheets), fell asleep to an open book, and dreamed of pissing pineapple juice. A second after this dream, I had to go again, so I woke up, stumbled sleepily to the toilet, and had the best piss of my waking life.

So, in a condensed step-by-step list format,

How to have the best piss of your waking life:

(1) purchase a pineapple
(2) wait until it is ready ripe (signs of ready ripeness are a fresh, tangy island aroma every time you walk by the fruit, mold growing on the bottom, and the yellowness of jaundice)
(3) gut the pineapple in the Vietnamese tradition, creating a series of nice spiral formations where the eyelets were sliced away; use a super-sharp stainless steel showtime knife if you happen to have one on hand-- or something equally as sharp
(4) go to ballet
(5) come back from ballet starving
(6) eat the entire pineapple with a fork
(7) enter state of immobility; cancel all plans to move off the couch
(8) go to mattress
(9) dream of pissing pineapple juice
(10) wake up and stumble sleepily to the toilet
(11) make sure it is a real toilet, and not a dream one
(12) have the best piss of your waking life

Notes from 5/16/11

2011-05-16T23:40:00.002-04:00

-work x2; watch Batman take down a pocketer of picks; coo at the happy cartoon baby who looks like he should have a purple crayon and be named Harold; feel overwhelming delight at seeing an old college friend in the shop; watch Serge perform heart surgery on the coffee brewer; machines can develop clogged arteries too; an aorta is but a pipe through which fluid flows
-chill out with Baxter the golden retriever; get Baxter hair all over my black capris, but forgive him his lovable amber eyes
-chill out with my Russian book, my russkaya kneega
-ballet x2; have an epiphany about the head's relation to the outstretched arm; help lead a ballet battalion

2011-05-15T15:38:00.000-04:00

Charting motivation level (ML) would be an interesting self-study. ML is at a dangerously low level after a nap, and yet the nap is needed. ML never fails to surge after ballet-- whether in the form of a class or a warm-up en solitude. Today, I took my warm-up to the rooftop and while stretching on the splintery rails, spied on my neighbors below playing basketball. In fact, I couldn't see them-- only their hologramic reflections in the glass windows of the houses across the street. Will be sad to leave this house come August. ML at a steady high rate behind the bar, but during morning shifts, surges to an excessive rate around noon.

Little Bucket Update #4

2011-05-12T23:21:00.000-04:00

Walking home from ballet, I nearly tread on a mass of gray lint. Something about the form of the mass drew me back up the sidewalk. Peering more closely, I discovered that the mass of gray lint was actually a dead sparrow, flattened out into two dimensions, one of its stick legs and claws sticking crookedly out one way, and its beak the other way. Ah...sadness...

A few steps later down the walk, another sight made me pause: An open egg carton, empty save for 3 eggshells that had been decorated presumably for the past Easter holiday. But these were the fanciest, most intricately-decorated Easter eggs I’d ever seen. One had a detailed portrait of a woman’s face in black and white with shading even, another was a more abstract floral black and white design. The third one was severely cracked. My mind crossed back to the pancaked sparrow, and for a moment, I had this fleeting, Hermes-like thought that the bird had come from these eggs. Juxtaposition of experiences gives rise to preposterous thoughts. I took the eggshells with me and dropped them-- with care-- into my bucket of whims.

Notes from my 3rd Warehouse Visit

2011-05-11T16:22:00.000-04:00

-wake to the sound of the garbage truck; run bags of trash out the door barefoot
-make a third voyage to the Warehouse by lightrail; practice releves and tendus in my new split-sole dance sneakers while waiting for the el
-meet a coffee farmer ambassador from Haiti who seems a bit lost when he's not following around his new business partners
-watch preparations for a mural painting; the artist sports paint-splattered shorts; he stands on the ladder and sketches lines on the canvas; in two weeks, the mural will be melted onto the wall of the new shop, an image of the Duomo of Milan reflecting off Philadelphia's City Hall; this symbolic mirror will hang adjacent to the actual mirror behind the bar; mirror mirror on the wall!
-glance through a book on Faema, the newest addition to my vocabulary after "collating", "aromatics", "gospodeen", "tovareesch", and "palimpsest"
-drink (coffee, of course) from a rust-colored La Colombe cappuccino cup-- the first one out of the boxes; Dilworth Plaza, here we come!
-baby carriages: as baneful as tupperware, but gotta roll with the times
-step foot into the new cafe still under construction; pretend to pull an espresso at the semicircling bar ("the island"); windowseats, black marble counters, bench seats, lamp shades shaped like ice cream cones, muted green bathroom tiles, large windows, and orange walls that transform into more translucent shades of orange as the sun alights on them; across the street, plans to transform the concrete into grass
-the word is anticipation; these are exciting times to be a barista at LC

Pineapple

2011-05-05T10:34:00.002-04:00

I gutted my first pineapple this morning.
It's not earth-shattering news, but it was a milestone for me.
And now, I know that the best way to peel a pineapple is in the Vietnamese tradition.
Some are born pineapple peelers.

I have this ridiculous dream of having a baby at the age of 37 and taking her (yes, a she) with me to Bali, Mozambique, Vietnam and other exotic places so that she can learn from the world, rather than from youtube.

This dream takes place after my current dream of being a ballerina-barista-bookworm.

I'm Going To

2011-05-03T17:32:00.003-04:00

I'm going to serve coffee with white azaleas in my hair and sparkling water in my blood.
I'm going to learn that one of my customers is an entomologist, and then I'm going to ask him for advice on how to not be scared of bugs.
I'm going to push sales of the almond croissants by telling customers they have less calories than a Whopper. I think I'd rather have a Whopper.
I'm going to spill coffee in front of my boss and then recover because the line is growing ceaselessly and affords me little time to dwell on my ill-timed clumsiness.
I'm going to wear a shirt with Bambi and Thumper on it and work at dizzying speeds, literally.
I'm going to say I'm going to watch a Barcelona-Real Madrid soccer game, and then not do it because I'm too beat after work.

Instead, I'm going to walk home with a tall and trusty friend.

I'm going to read and think about the killing of Osama Bin Laden. I'm going to keep quiet; there is already an overabundance of opinions, most of them are loud and meaningless.
I'm going to post a picture on flickr and facebook.
I'm going to nap with pink azaleas in my hair.

babies! I love them to bits, and I also feel a great weight for them.

I'm going to coo at a baby and tickle its tiny little feet.

Little Bucket Update #3

2011-04-30T21:47:00.001-04:00

The Serbian plucked a bouquet of bold pink azalea clusters from its parent shrub and handed it to me.

“There you go, happy birthday!”

I stuck it in my hair and we walked on home in evening shadows, skirting the perimeter of the park to avoid the poopy stench of freshly applied mulch, and speaking of pizza and things. We always talk about food on the walk home because we’re always starving after work. On the other hand, we’re always too fatigued to cook anything exotic, and so we just dream of exotic dinners, then go home and eat convenience store food or worse.

This time, however, I stir-fried spears of asparagus. The azaleas went into the bucket of whims. Birthdays are wonderful. Everyone made me feel so strangely special. As much as I want to say that I don’t need that...

Dear Year 27

2011-04-29T14:16:00.001-04:00

What is a year in the twenties without drive and dreams? A set of guidelines for the 3^3 year of this individual's life:

-read more; don't buy any books
-cook more
-become a better spy (keep this one secret)
-invest in a sewing machine for my apron & bow tie biz
-build a dollhouse
-buy a ticket to Moscow (round trip)
-draw more unicorns
-play more music
-call umma more
-be a ballerina 24/7
-be proud and don't feel stupid
-live outside the box

Little Bucket Update

2011-04-28T09:42:00.003-04:00

I woke up this morning and found my bucket filled with jellybeans.

Little Bucket of Whims

2011-04-27T10:12:00.000-04:00

Candide is the story of the failures of Optimism (the philosophy, not the attitude). It is the detailing of one character’s miseries after another to demonstrate the invalidity of the claim that everything is for the best, and that this world is the best of all possible worlds. In the end, the posse of main characters happen upon a Turk farmer who is unlike all the other personalities they have thus far encountered in the story in that he is not royalty, not of the noble cast, and not a distinguished member of the Church. The farmer does not lead a lavish life, he is not a man of means-- but he does have enough means. He has some acreage of land, and he has a wife and children who work with him to maintain this “garden”. This plot he sees as his lot in life-- not riches and gold, nor titles nor fame, nor a quest for answers to the great philosophical questions of morality and the existence of evil, of the existence and purpose of God; only to keep at bay the three known evils-- boredom, vice, and necessity- by spending his days cultivating his garden.

The last line of Candide (spoken by Candide),

“All that is well and good, but we must go and cultivate our garden.”

may be interpreted from either an optimistic point-of-view or a pessimistic one. Perhaps tilling the earth in the literal fashion, leading an organic life and maintaining our attachment to the earth that begets life is truly the way to happiness, satisfaction, or purpose. Or perhaps the last line can be viewed as an extremely banal and trite conclusion to a sweeping exploration of an influential philosophical paradigm. In this pessimistic interpretation, the banality of the last line mirrors the banality of life itself, that after all this searching and questing for truth, for purpose, for meaning, it turns out that the joke is on us for (a) thinking there was more to life than survival or (b) thinking that even if there was a grand design or purpose, that we were part of the elite, privileged crowd who could or would be allowed to comprehend such a design or purpose, when in truth, we are no better than mice on a ship, for whom the captain doesn’t give a damn.

All this talk of purpose and design and gardening brings me to a bar in West Philadelphia, where one night I went with some friends for a breast cancer awareness benefit (or something). I ordered sweet potato fries from the menu and it came in this cheap silver tin bucket along with a ramekin of sweet and spicy mustard and another ramekin filled with barbeque sauce. As the dinner coursed on, gardening came up and I chatted on to my friends for a while about the book Candide as I did above. As time ticked on and the sweet potato fries dwindled, a strange attachment began to form between me and the cheap tin bucket. Suddenly, I found that I wanted nothing more than to take that bucket home and plant a little garden in it of my own. Would that be stealing?

“You can get the same thing from Target for under a dollar!”

“Yes, but it wouldn’t be my bucket. It didn’t hold my sweet potato fries.”

Sure I was being irrational and saying stupid things just to say things-- as I often do-- but as also often happens, my words began to take hold, and by the end of the dinner, I really did love that little bucket more than anything. I dreamed at the table of what sort of flora I could plant into it-- flowers or herbs? I took a sheet of “Where the Wild Things Are” stickers that my friend had on hand for the event and plastered my bucket with childish images of monsters on swings and children pretending to be monsters. Already, it was like a child to me. How quickly and easily meaning and attachments are formed!

I stashed my tin baby in a plastic sack along with my leftovers and brought it home with me that night. It spent the night on the kitchen counter unwashed, still reeking of the oils from the deep-fried potato cuts.

Two days later, I gave my bucket its first cleaning with orange-scented Dawn dish soap. It maintained its tarnished image and its stickers, but was relieved of the grease. I set it upside down on a paper towel to dry.

Two nights later, as I ambled through the city streets, on my way home from work, I felt myself seized by the balmy night air so unusual for the month of April, and by the beautiful blooms that hung heavily from the branches that not a month ago and for months before that had stood stripped of life, barren, skinny and wanting. I passed under the eaves of a large cherry blossom tree bursting with miniature pale pink bouquets and thought of my bucket. Half a block later, I doubled back to the tree, reached up and plucked one of the miniature bouquets from one of the thick stems branching out of the mother trunk.

“Don’t kill the flowers!”

I whipped my head around and caught a glimpse of the soothsayer in the dark as he flashed by on his bike. His words trailed behind him. I looked down at the flowers I had just plucked. Already a flurry of petals had been shaken from their fragile attachments and laid a-scattered on the sidewalk.

What remained of the bouquet ended up in my bucket shortly thereafter. I decided the following that evening as I stood back and admired my bucket now dressed to the nines in princess pink: the contents of my little bucket would change perpetually and unexpectedly, depending on nothing in particular and with no particular timeline. It would be a bucket of whims; it would not be your average potted plant.

…..................................................

Gazpacho!

2011-04-26T20:33:00.000-04:00

I made the most interesting gazpacho today. Truth be told, it was less a gazpacho and more a hybrid of gazpacho, pico de gallo, and chickpea salad. To further elaborate, it was

(a) like gazpacho, but more spiced like a pico de gallo salsa due to an overdose of onion and peppers, and chunkier due to the addition of chickpeas into both the blended and unblended parts

(b) like pico de gallo, but soupier like gazpacho due to the partial blending, and chunkier/more mediterranean salad-like due to the addition of chickpeas

(c) like chickpea salad, but soupier like gazpacho due to the partial blending, and more spiced like salsa due to the overdose of onion and peppers

-as is, it would taste best as a dip
-next time, I would chop in less onion and peppers to make it less dippy and more edible as a main dish
-I <3 chickpeas very much; gonna make more chickpea dishes in the future

To Did List 4/26/11

2011-04-26T15:36:00.002-04:00

-ballet warm-up focusing on slow, exact tendus
-wish Jess a Happy Royal Wedding Eve Eve Eve
-pick up a huge dying beetle, thinking that it is a dead flower; keep 70% of the resulting scream inside so as not to scare away the customers
-make a curving leaf + heart in a cappuccino cup
-learn that the woman who gets the slightly short extra dry double skim cappuccino to-go has a beautiful name-- Lubov (Любовь), meaning "love" in Russian; see her in a new light
-plan a dill gazpacho dinner to mark the end of a beautiful summery day

Grilled Cheese Sandwich

2011-04-22T14:33:00.000-04:00

Last night, I watched an episode of "Glee" featuring a grilled cheese sandwich. Suddenly I had a serious craving for a real grilled cheese sandwich. This morning I woke up at 6:55 am and the first thing I thought about was a grilled cheese sandwich. I went downstairs, fired up the gas stove, threw together a couple slices of seeded rye bread, muenster cheese, and sriracha sauce, and grilled until the fire alarm went off. This note is really for my roommates, as an apology for disrupting their sleep this morning, all for the sake of satisfying a stupid craving for a stupid grilled cheese sandwich. I'm sure you understand. And the grilled cheese sandwich was to die for...just like our house.

4/20 2011

2011-04-21T08:30:00.001-04:00

The first 80-degree day since last summer. I took my current read, Candide, up to the rooftop, but after I set up the blanket and lay down to read, all I could do for a while was stare up at the blue sky. I thought about my favorite passage in War & Peace-- the passage about the infinite blue sky that made me fall deeply in love with the book (luckily it was relatively early on in the tome). The warmth and slight humidity swept me away into days gone by. Summers spent in dirty frat houses. Those five days on the beach in Florida. My old college friends. Those five days in Oman. Good times occur in sets of five days. Birds sang and bees the size of dragonflies buzzed around me, but far enough not to scare me. I felt a world away. Eventually I picked up the book and read until near-conclusion, but a few pages before the end, I put my head down and drifted off. Woke up just in time for ballet.

2011-04-20T07:52:00.001-04:00

Among the litany of items we don't carry at the shop (the most commonly asked-for items being soy, flavored syrups, and wifi), are non-spoon utensils. My usual response to customers who ask for them is:

"Sorry we don't have forks. All we have are big spoons and small spoons."

Imagine my surprise...

Yesterday, I accidentally served a fork to a customer. The man used it to stir his coffee, oblivious of it's four-pronged structure, then sleepily set it down on his plate. I looked up from the register to see my co-worker picking up the used utensil and staring at it.

"Oh my god, it's a fork!" I cried, "Where'd that come from?"

"You're the one who served it!" said G.

"What's a fork doing at La Colombe?"

G groaned. "Details Angela!"

In my defense, it had been a long and trying week during which I was inflicted with feelings of inadequacy at my job. Luckily, the people I work with are a caring and supportive bunch. I feel restored anew.

To Did List 4/15/2010

2011-04-15T21:23:00.002-04:00

-wash ballet clothes. Check.
-go to ballet. Check.
-go on a hot dog hunt after all the food carts have shut down for the day. Check.
-embarrass Hoa at the Apple Store by bringing her a birthday hot dog and wishing her an extremely loud happy birthday; make her turn an ungodly shade of red. Check.

"You do realize that up until now, no one here knew it was my birthday right?"

Of course, Hoa, that's why we came!

I might regret that last task in exactly two weeks. Will have to make sure I don't get scheduled for work that day.

To Did List

2011-04-07T22:14:00.002-04:00

-share an Amish club sandwich at Reading Terminal
-play 20 (x10) questions with the old man from Home Alone who appears evil but turns out to be really nice and heroic
-pet an inanimate puppy statue
-get dark chocolate and toasted almond gelato with a Canadian friend
-play with a baby; she wore a furry brown hood with bear ears on her darling little head; Little Bear and I played "Up"; we went up and down the fountain step over and over again; we fell down and picked ourselves up; she dropped and picked up my Vitamin water; I hugged Little Bear goodbye and disappeared
-have a stoop chat; Radical Asteroids Never Dance On Me

2011-04-04T15:17:00.036-04:00

This morning, a man walked into the shop wearing a chartreuse green bow tie with tiny recycling symbols scattered all over it. It had been a gift; he worked for an environmental organization. Later, another man walked in sporting a lavender bow tie adorned with tiny white cranes in mid-flight. Yet later, another man walked in wearing a full-length burgundy red tie playfully decorated with wind and brass instruments and musical notes. By this time, I was of the opinion that the tie has became the predominant-- often the sole means of personal expression for the male professional. Someday, I decided, I too will wear a crazy tie to work. What sort of tie will I wear? I could go for irony, the abstract, the poetic, or fun and Ms. Frizzle-esque. The possibilities are endless.

Carpe Mane

2011-04-03T05:52:00.003-04:00

Good morning world! It is 4 in the morning, and I cannot sleep so I shall be awake and do wake-y things.

Wake-y things:

-eat cheez-its to soothe gnawing guts
-read Candide and laugh at faux-logic
-listen to Chopin; hear the birds
-make a list

The Case of the Disfigured Coin

2011-03-28T08:45:00.002-04:00

I finally made it out to the Warehouse after hearing all about what a great, fun place it was from everyone, and they certainly were not lying! The place is a giant playground. Even getting there was an adventure, thanks to my own stupidity. I took the Light Rail in exactly the wrong direction and ended up at the very spot I had started at 1.5 hours ago. Sigh. I had to call and admit my stupidity so that they wouldn’t wonder why I was more than an hour late for my appointment. Sigh. As a consolation, I reminded myself that I was never “lost”; I was “exploring”.

And indeed, North Philadelphia is a very different place from Center City/South Philly. There were times when I wish I had a million dollars to give the entire region a facelift, full-body tuck, and a sex change operation; there were other times when I found the disintegrated buildings and surroundings very beautiful. (And yes, there were many “times” because I was on that trolley for a long fucking time).

One of the most interesting moments of that trolley ride was when we entered the area populated by Islamic Philadelphians. I forget sometimes of that aspect of Philadelphia that I found so strange when I first arrived as a fresh-faced college-bound kid. Soon after we entered this area, my ears perked up as I picked up words of a conversation taking place between the two women sitting behind me. “Allah”, “the Prophet”, “Insha’llah”. It has been a while since I’ve heard these words, and I was hearing them now on an eternal trolley ride through ghetto Philadelphia.

At last, the trolley pulled up to my stop, a few blocks away from the roastery.

“Thought you’d never arrive huh?” said the bus driver.

Yes thank you. I ran out of there and didn’t stop running. (I hate being late.) I ran all the way instead of bothering to wait for Renee to pick me up. The cold air did a number on my lungs; I couldn’t stop coughing for the first half-hour or so after my arrival. The amazing thing is, I smelled the roastery even before I saw it. That smell of coffee that is now so familiar to me, that clings to my clothes and hair, and permeates my very skin, and remains there until my next shower; which then fills up the curtained-off shower as soon as I run myself under the hot water (an alternative form of hotboxing). I followed that smell the rest of the way to the Warehouse.

Giant sea-green sorting machine, pipes running every which way carrying beans, gases; bright red monster roasting machine; tank of liquid nitrogen harvested from the surrounding air; heavy sacks of beans from Brazil and elsewhere, waiting to be tested, sorted, and roasted. Bins full of roasted beans degassing or waiting to be bagged, labeled with the familiar names of our blends (Nizza, Corsica,...). Bins full of ground bean that feels almost as soft as flour as I run my fingers through the dark brown meal. A computer system with a readout screen that displays the analyses of the beans being roasted, and several attached dials like video game controls with which one can single-handedly control how the beans are roasted with respect to flavor, aroma, darkness, etc. Drums-- solid versus perforated. Perforated wins, but solid prevails in the current state of roasting. The destoning process, like column chromatography except separated by weight. More later. A spectrometer used to test samples of the roasted beans every 15 minutes.

In the other room, antique roasting machines refurbished to a shiny vintage state, or else in the process of being refurbished like the one destined for the new Chicago shop. Large skids piled high with boxes of beans. One man winds clear tape around and around before rolling the skid out for shipment. Lots of Frenchies. Bagging Lionhearted. Overall, for such a large operation, it’s a surprisingly small crowd that handles everything from sourcing the beans, sales and promoting, all the way down to serving them in beverage form at our three current locations in NYC and Philly. About 100 people to make it all happen.

A few times while Todd was treating me to a one-on-one tour during one of his rare free hours, I felt very much like a certain character from a certain book penned by Roald Dahl; like a very special child being given a very special tour of a very special chocolate factory. In fact, I had my own “gold ticket” moment of sorts. It happened when Todd opened up the destoning tray. From among the usual impurities like stones and kernels of corn, he pulled out a shiny gold-colored coin.

“Well now, this is amazing.”

In the 20-some odd years that he’s been roasting, explained Todd, this was only the second time he’s ever pulled out a coin from the destoning tray. Wow, what were the chances? I felt like I had just inherited a million dollars-- or a great secret. Now for a thorough description of this archaeological find: it is gold-toned, and has a raised edge with a distinct border. It is folded in half and there are two roasted coffee beans trapped in this space. The only legible inscriptions are a zero on one side and parts of two words that run along the curved border. It reads something like:

...MONOA... BLANC...

Where the bold indicates certainty in the identification of the letter. Other than those above inscriptions, nothing else can be made out. Everywhere else, the coin is pock-marked with dents from going through that monster roasting machine.

My benefactor peered at the coin for a few seconds before handing it to me for keeps. “It looks like it could be from Indonesia,” he said offhandedly, “but I can’t see anything without my reading glasses. With his glasses, my globetrotter boss could probably easily have identified the coin’s origin. However,...Upon my own inspection, I found a zero engraved off to one side of the heavily-damaged coin, but otherwise, just dents. It wasn’t until I got home later that night and studied it under better lighting that I found the words.

For the time being, I simply pocketed the find and followed my guide as he continued his tour of this great playground, giving super-animated descriptions of the rest of the process, explaining the difference between roasting with solid versus perforated drums, explaining why he was going to bring the old pre-Strada espresso machine back into the shop for pure espresso shots, and sharing stories about back in the day when they were young twenty-something-year-olds skateboarding around the then one-room warehouse, roasting beans on a much much smaller scale.

After the tour of the pipes and machines, we went upstairs to his and J.P’s office, which is another amazing infusion of all kinds of smells-- but mostly tobacco. The smell hits you like a wall when you first walk in, and on the one hand, it smells good; on the other hand, it smells like a hamster’s nest. Two large desks sprawled with papers, books on trade, architectural blueprints, and other important clutter. The two desks face a large blackboard and I sat back on one of the leather chairs and watched and listened as Todd took a piece of chalk and started writing and sketching all over this blackboard, giving me a visual speed-tutorial on coffee origin and its harvesting process. Arabica versus Robusta. Typica. Region, varietal, size. Like coffee bloodtype: A, AB, AA, AA+, or 10-18+. Altitude. Natural versus wet processing. Brought me back to my college days.

“What else, what else?” he kept saying to himself throughout the tour. There was so much that he could show and tell me that it boggled my mind every time he said this. He showed me a room, a spare-looking room with two long tables and benches made of wood that was polished to a sheen but so “raw” that you could see the particular tree from which it was made. Along the white walls were hung large-scale framed photos of coffee farmers and landscapes-- the very ones that used to hang on the walls of the Rittenhouse shop before they were replaced by a rotating array of artwork by local artists. Hum, I’d wondered what had happened to these images. Another small secret discovered.

At the front of this room, facing these tables, was a faux-barista station equipped with some ceramics just like the ones we used at the shop. I learned that this room was going to be used for training purposes-- a place for trainers to train trainers because it was so impossible to interrupt the flow of business at the shops for this purpose. Sitting at the edge of the table nearest the door were two portable hand crank antique roasters. The one on the left had given birth to La Colombe’s Nizza blend and belonged to J.P.; the other one, which belonged to Todd, had given birth to our Afrique blend. The latter roaster dated back to 1927, a year that had special significance for Todd and so he had jumped on the opportunity to purchase this particular toy. Significance...is not something that exists inherently in anything or anyone. One imparts significance upon things and people...and dates. It is not a sign from God; it is rather a sign from you who perceives and receives the sign and gives it special meaning.

A coin is a coin, and when it’s found deformed and disfigured in a destoning tray at a coffee roastery thousands of miles away, it’s a coin that accidentally fell out of a harvester’s pocket and got mixed up with the beans along with stones and kernels of corn. Yet, I couldn’t help being pulled by the mystery surrounding this coin’s identity. When I got home later that night, I googled all possible iterations of the words I could think of, along with images of coins from the countries we source from, but found nothing. A couple days later, I showed my co-workers, who also tried to figure out its origin in between making drinks and doing dishes. They were equally stumped.

On Monday morning, I woke up and determined that I would find the origin of this coin even if I had to painstakingly go through every nation on this planet and study their money. As daunting as such a project sounds, the fact of the matter is the number of nations on this planet is finite, and so the answer was there, somewhere. I made a second attempt at google: I visited the World Coin Gallery website and drafted the following list as I checked each nation:

Countries checked (blends that source from this country):

Indonesia (Monte Carlo)
Brazil (all)
Rwanda (Afrique)
Ethiopia (Afrique, Nizza, Monaco, Phocea, Savoia)
Tanzania (Afrique, Savoia)
Haiti (the Haitian)
El Salvador (Phocea)
Guatemala (none). End mystery.

And boy was I lucky that the list ended here and not 200 countries later. As it turns out, the full inscription reads: “MONJA BLANCA FLOR NACIONAL”
The Monja Blanca, or “White Nun” is the national flower of Guatemala symbolizing peace, beauty, and art. It’s also known by the scientific crowd as Lycaste Skinneri Alba, (belonging to the Lycaste genus of orchids, species discovered by an Englishman named Skinner in the 1800s), and grows in the moderate altitudes (1200-1800 feet) of Guatemala, Mexico, Honduras, and El Salvador in their moist montane forests and pine-oak-liquidambar forests. An image of the virile-looking trefoil-like monja blanca is impressed into the center space. To its right reads the denomination, 50 centavos (a Spanish/Portuguese word meaning ‘one-hundredth’, from Latin centum + suffix -avo).

On the flip (“observe” as the numismatists would say) side, the inscription “Republica de Guatemala [date]” circumscribes the central figure of the Guatemalan coat of arms: two Bay Laurels branches forming a wreath around a pair of crossed rifles fitted with bayonets; a pair of daggers crossed underneath the rifles; overlaid in the center by a scroll inscribed with the date of Central America’s independence from Spain (“Libertad 15 de septiembre de 1821”). Sitting atop the right-hand corner of this scroll is a Resplendent Quetzal, the national bird of Guatemala, which bears a great presence in Mesoamerican mythology.

It is made of brass.

But Guatemala? A mystery in itself! None of our blends sourced from this Central American nation, so what was one of its coins doing amongst our beans? I sent the following email to my boss:

Hey Todd, do you source from Guatemala? And if so, for which blend?

About an hour later, I received the following response:

Yes we do - Guatemala is an important component in our new upcoming blend Louisiane.

QED. Case Closed.

Following the discovery/revelation, a dialogue between Sarah and I:

“You know what this means right?”

“What?”

“I have to go to Guatemala.”

“Why?”

“It’s a sign! From the coffee god.”

Impulse

2011-03-25T13:07:00.001-04:00

Have you ever woken up with the driving need to do something besides going pee? This morning, I woke up and felt the need to photograph...everything. I quickly brushed my teeth, put on sunblock and warm clothing (I know, contradiction), and rushed out the door with my third eye. I didn't know in which direction I wanted to go, and just went with my guts-- when in doubt, chase the sunlight. So I chased, and everything, everything was beautiful and photo-worthy. A junky abandoned lot, the texture of a wall, bricks scattered across a muddy yard, these weird phallic plants whose fur was illuminated gorgeously by the rising sun's rays. The moon was still out, and that was gorgeous...when is the moon ever not gorgeous, though?

Goodmorning, Moon

The perception of beauty is fickle. It's definitely not just a lunarscape I see here, but a lunarscape colored by my own imagination and current mood. What we assume to be perceptions of reality are really just derivatives of the real thing. There are days when everything looks so dreadfully ordinary, and then there are days like today when I have no choice, but am moved by an impulse to photograph all these worldly objects, scenes and people which suddenly appear so vibrant.


That's What She Said


Brilliance Through Wrought Iron


Violin Arm


Before the Workday Begins


Street Coat of Arms

Tropical Bird

Banner Waves of Plastic

I stopped by Whole Foods on the return trip home and bought food unnecessarily. I saw cheese and suddenly had a hankering for cheese. I saw bread, and suddenly, nothing sounded better than a carby, glutinous chunk of bread. The raisin challah was such a perfect balance of sweet and savory-- only hints of each, unlike the raisin danishes we sell at the shop, but sometimes, subtle flavoring is so much more delicious than a gobsmacking dosage of butter and sugar.

I'm considered an "asset"! They want me to "grow with the company"! They like me. These official-sounding terms were tossed at me in the most nonchalant, unstuffy manner in the little office where we count up the register every night. I gotta say, it's really strange how life creeps up on you. I spent years wondering if I'd ever fit in anywhere ever, and then today I realized I'm already knee-deep in something more substantial than a job-in-passing. I'm slightly hesitant to voice this aloud, but 9 months into it, my gut says that I've found a sort of home with LC.

I confess, when I was headed to college 9 years ago, and while I was pulling all-nighters at Penn studying for math exams and writing bullshit papers, and when I left school with not a clue as to where my future "career" lay, I never once imagined that I'd end up working for a roasting company and dancing ballet. I'm excited about the opportunities that lay ahead-- involvement with projects in Haiti and Africa, learning about sourcing and roasting and visiting actual coffee farms, and of course serving hundreds and hundreds of drinks every week. Shit...thanks Penn: it was worth racking up a $70K debt if that's what it took to bring me to my present life. Worth every penny.

Footwear, Optimism, & March Madness

2011-03-21T18:26:00.004-04:00

Will I ever be too old to wear bubblegum pink knee-high socks sprinkled with hearts and flowers?

It occurred to me today while staring down at my lurid pink socks that there will come a time when I won't be able to wear the rather childish getups that I sometimes put together for myself in the morning.

This thought made me get all defensive for all of one minute before I decided now was now and later was later, and that I was going to milk my youth for all it was worth.

I then spent the afternoon singing showtunes.

I dreamed a dream in days gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

~Les Miserables. Coincidentally, I'm in the middle of reading Candide, which may as well also be called "Les Miserables", for it is essentially the detailing of one miserable event after another to illustrate the idiocy of the philosophical doctrine of Optimism. With it's humorously euphemistic and/or explicit mention of syphilis, sex, fingers being inserted into orifices "usually reserved for an enema syringe", and other X-rated topics, I had to check the publishing year: 1759! I guess that makes me the ignorant prude.

One day, about a month ago, we had a rather insane afternoon at the coffeeshop. "Wow, today was a madhouse!" I exclaimed at the end of the day. The next day, it was a madhouse once again. As the month went on, I realized the insanity of that first day was no exceptional occurrence: it was merely the beginning of the spring season at L.C. March madness indeed! Now that the schedule has changed, I've been working with different people every time, and it's taken some getting used to. I've learned that my abundance of energy is not suitable for everyone, so sometimes it's necessary to tame it. While learning to tame it, I've been putting greater emphasis on good customer service and good drinks to as many individuals as possible, which is a challenge with the increase in volume of customers that the warm weather has brought on.

It's been brought to my-- and everyone else's attention that each drink matters a hell of a lot. One bad drink that you let slip could boomerang back at you, whether in the form of a yelp review or a review by the city's premier food critic. People are harsh. Critics are a beast. First they'll attack you from the side with some witty insult about the way you dress, which has nothing to do with your work, and then they'll cut you directly from the front with a written, public reminder of that one bad drink you made on an otherwise good night. This latest review had its intended side-effect, I suppose. The Weekender was on top of his game yesterday and would barely let me help him the way I'm used to helping him. I learned later that it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with him proving to himself that he could handle the job and handle it well. He even made a marijuana leaf in one of his practice lattes. Nice. Not on purpose of course.

Yesterday marked the end of my 9th month at the shop-- my LC pregnancy, as I've been calling it (mostly to myself). I've just given birth to a beautiful baby...bean. We happened to get on the subject of names during our evening cleaning routine, and I discovered that as much as girls have a tendency to have an easy time picking out favorite girl names and bother themselves much less about boy names, boys have the opposite tendency. It seems like an obvious complementary tendency, but I always assumed picking out future baby names of any gender was a girly thing and that boys didn't bother with it much. According to my sample size of two, this isn't entirely true. My two male co-workers have boy names readily picked out, but girl names? They prefer to assume they won't have girls, period. Hah. Good luck against nature, guys.

I like Isabelle and Summer.

Hipster Bazaar

2011-03-10T19:19:00.000-05:00

Women in headscarves riffling through a disorderly pile of clothes on the ground-- what a throwback to my Iraq days. Hipsters color my world...especially my photo world. The rest of the world walks past in noir blurs, while hipsters gather in their crazy colorful patchwork outfits with spaceships on their skirts and stars on their shirts trying on old blue sneakers and shaking the dust off a secondhand carnation pink coat. These days, the term 'hipster' is automatically accompanied by a disdainful eye-roll and a mention of PBR. Whatever their quirks, whatever their intentions, I appreciate them for bringing color and the unexpected into the city. They give me pause; they make me wonder.

What Appears to Be

2011-02-28T15:55:00.035-05:00

"Go fast...but go slow." It's an adage I learned at work, which I had forgotten on Saturday, but remembered on Sunday. When you're working mindlessly for six hours straight nonstop, it's crucial to have moments of pause even while the line of customers continues to grow. Yesterday, I kept watering myself like a plant throughout the shift and used the time it took for bags of coffee to grind to forget about the customers and have those 30 seconds to still my body and my mind, and to be alone. Also took a lot more occasions to clean up and re-stock. I realized yesterday that these breaks serve two purposes: first, the more practical purpose of stalling the line, giving your co-worker time to bust out the drinks before dumping more orders on him; and second, it's a wonder what those tiny breaks can do for your peace-of-mind. They afford you moments of respite from the act of projecting yourself outwardly to the people on the other side of the bar, which can be rather draining on busy days.

Working behind the bar at LC is a study in consciousness. You're there with the customer, but you're not always there...when the lines are long, you turn into a scarily-efficient automaton, but part of you remains human-- the part that interacts with the people on the other side of the register. However, the degree to which your mind is with your customer, with your co-worker, or with yourself varies throughout the shift. Sometimes, I don't think I am even aware of myself. My body is simply in motion: one hand is pouring coffee, the other is counting cash, while one ear is listening for the grinder to finish and one eye is looking to see who is next in line, while the other eye is checking on the progress of the drinks being made and trying to retain the last few orders in a very short term memory bank. It's a very disjointed feeling, like your brain is in five different places at once. This job is quintessential multitasking. If one were to make an image of it, it would look like a Dali painting with an ear here an eye there, an arm here, an arm there, and a third arm sticking out of the head. Frightful.

And of course the face is smiling and the lips are moving in conversation. When the lines are long, the conversations tend to become automaton phrases because what's primarily on your mind is to get the line moving. However, I realized yesterday that these autopilot modes have to be punctuated by constant reminders to focus on the customers in front of you and to forget that there is a long line behind that is only growing longer. Whenever I remind myself like this to come out of autopilot mode and into the present, it feels like waking from a sort of sleep; I can actually feel this seismic shift taking place from one mental state to the other. Undoubtedly, these moments are when I'm doing the best at my job, which is to give the customer the full espresso bar experience: introduce them to the different sorts of drinks if need be, service them with beautiful custom-made ceramics from Italy, joke with them, be present with them and not with the next customers in line, and if things slow down, have a decent conversation.

As a barista at LC, the conversations you hold with your customers range from trifling small talk to funny quips to genuine to meaningful requiring thought to truly profound. Most of the interactions cluster around the first category (especially on a day of unceasing lines), and of the latter two, there may be as few as one or two a day. Truth be told, I welcome the trifles and quips as much as the more meaningful, genuine conversations. It's an interesting experience getting to know people through small talk. A question here and there about how their day is going, what they do for a living, what task they hope to accomplish at the shop that day while they're sipping on their usual Americano, and before you know it, he's telling you that he's about to become a father, or that he just got engaged that day. Meaning, through a series of small talks over the course of a few months, he's grown comfortable enough with you to tell you these details about his personal life...and I'm perfectly comfortable receiving such personal information, despite the fact that we've never sat down at a table together, never hung out outside of the shop, never interacted beyond the boundaries of a barista-customer relationship. Which is to say, the barista-customer relationship is not a trivial one.

It is equally as interesting to get to know the person who is stuck behind the bar with you in that 3-foot-wide space for 6 hours at a time. In this tiny space, one has no choice but to start learning about the person who is sharing that space with you. It is practically forced upon you, and the process is sped up because of the size of the space and the fact that you're working together as a team. Such a situation I think can bring out the best and the worst in each of us. Undoubtedly, there are moments of tension and awkward bumbling, as well as moments of perfect play. There are a lot of moments of the first type when you first begin working with a particular person, and it remains so until you figure out how the other person works and vice versa, and how to work together. I'll be the first to admit that the first two or three months with my regular weekend co-worker were not easy for either of us. It got downright torturous before it got better, and now...it couldn't be better. We've got our game down to a science now, and even on the busiest of days, we hit our stride with ease.

Everyone I've worked with has his or her own style of working, and this is first and foremost how I got to know my co-workers as people. Their personalities come out in the way they work. And as I discovered during our company bowling party, their personalities also come out in the way they bowl. In brief, they bowl like they make lattes: cool and confident with a practiced, professional looking stride; OCD down to wiping the ball before each roll and crouching at a particular angle; and the class clown who shakes his ass and throws himself onto the floor, and somehow manages to knock the pins down anyway.

And I'm willing to bet that it isn't just making drinks or bowling, but that a person's personality is revealed in whatever activity he engages in. With practice, one could probably learn a lot about a person just by watching them bowl, cook, dance, or simply walk. Even between Sarah and I, Kip has only confused us exactly twice in the year-and-a-half he's known us. According to his own explanation, he has an easy time telling us apart because we dance so differently, I having more and faster movement in my upper body, and Sarah being a lot calmer up there. Interestingly, the word "calm" has been used on numerous independent occasions to describe the difference between me and my twin.

What I find most interesting in this whole exploration of brain, behavior, and personality is that although what one projects to the outside world is often hardly relevant or reflective of one's inner state of mind, it somehow is a good indicator of personality, which involuntarily, unconsciously colors everything we do.

Poetry

2011-02-26T23:27:00.001-05:00

Reading is therapeutic. I came home quite exhausted from the madhouse that was work today. It was a night when I could really have used someone to lean on. Instead of succumbing to my fancies, however, I began reading poetry and wikipedia articles-- aloud at first, then eventually falling into silent reading. I'm spending this year reading poetry because I don't understand it, or understand it very little. Why do I bother? I am convinced that there must be something to it, these fanciful words that either rhyme or don't rhyme at all, all these murky allusions, and the worship of Shelley, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Rilke, Ginsberg...to me, poetry is like a secret, incomprehensible world to which I lack the key, but on the other side of which there is something marvelous. For now, I read it for pure sound like the way I hear French sometimes nowadays. Sometimes the rhythm of a line (or of several lines) or a particular string of words strikes me as really lovely. What I do understand is that every little thing that you read or see or hear affects your brain in often imperceptible ways, and so I do not consider reading poetry with such little understanding of it a waste of my time.

The first book of poetry I ever read was Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the whole of which I read on the 11-hour plane ride from Istanbul to the States in June 2009. The book was passed on to me by a great friend, Jess. The second was Rilke's Duino Elegies, lent to me by my free-spirited roommate Holly, and which I read last year. The third was Gibran's The Prophet, which was given to me by a regular customer at the shop. I enjoyed reading this one particularly because my copy was in French; reading books in French is like a great jigsaw puzzle for me. Had I read The Prophet in my native English, I think I would have found it rather cliche overall.

The fourth, which I am currently reading was lent to me by a girl called Kata, whom I met one night at Capogiro's and never saw again. She is 24 and her best friend is a 77-year-old man-- another regular customer at the shop. The book is Ginsberg's Kaddish, and I find it to be the most accessible book of poetry I've read yet. It is largely autobiographical, the first section devoted to writings about his mentally ill mother, which I found heartbreaking-- for him a hell of a lot more than for her. As is usually the case with mentally ill folks and their loved ones. Tonight, I found myself reading Ginsberg's Wikipedia page and was intrigued to discover just how progressive, humanist, and pacificist a man he had been.

Rumi, T.S. Eliot, and Baudelaire are on the agenda, as are non-poetry books. This year will be a year of books. I will find solace, beauty, rhythm, secrets, ideas, voices, and wisdom between the pages.

Aside from reading poetry visually, I found this gem online.

Floral Pattern

2011-02-14T00:14:00.004-05:00

During a walk down South Street this evening, a young mother of some Asian descent walked in my direction on the same side of the street. In her left hand, she held a bouquet of red roses, and in her right, she held the hand of her little girl. The little girl was purposefully not walking straight, leaning her entire weight lazily to the side and putting great strain on her mother. The mother was resigned to the weight and didn't force her child upright. Her face showed quiet fatigue that contrasted remarkably with the joyful bloom of flowers that she carried.

A couple blocks later, a gang of punks on bicycles too small for them rode by in a line down the street, purposely screeching their tires and laughing raucously at their own gall and coolness. A middle-aged black man in a ragged hoodie walking in my direction-- again on the same side of the street-- glared at them and cursed their youthful stupidity under his breath. He also carried a bouquet of flowers under his arm, though these were multi-colored, not all roses, and not all red. Also, his other hand was without child, and he walked with a loping gait.

Another couple blocks later, a young white man perhaps in his thirties, tall, lean, with square glasses rushed passed me in the opposite direction-- and still on the same side of the street. He was in a great hurry and walked with stiff legs, unable to take the time to bend them between steps. He also carried a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

It occurred to me suddenly that I had just walked by three individuals within the span of 4 city blocks carrying bouquets of flowers and in various states of rush and mood. It only took about another half-second for it to register in my brain that tonight was the eve of St. Valentine's Day.

A few hours later, on my own way back home, guess what I carried in my hand?

A bag of green grapes. Patterns are meant to be broken.

Non-temporality of Life

2011-01-25T11:30:00.000-05:00

"Yesterday is but the memory of today; tomorrow is its dream." --Gibran

Considering time in terms of human cognitive activities (memory and dreaming) rather than as discrete, impersonal units...I like that. This statement is predicated on the assumption that time is subjective, a man-made concept, its own existence dependent on the existence of humans-- or at least a human. It predicates an observer, a thinking organism.

So, as for linguistic implications, instead of "What did you do yesterday?" and "What are you doing tomorrow?", we would be bound to ask "What do you remember today?" and "What do you dream of today?"; it always being Today. And different tenses being marked by "remembering" and "dreaming" rather than by inflection of the verb "to do". Not very practical, but very poetic.

A Kinship with Fish

2011-01-21T06:00:00.001-05:00

The longer I look at these moon shots, the more I think that we are like fish in the deep sea. The branches are floating strands of seaweed, the air is our water, and the moon the light in the distant surface of the ocean hinting at an entirely separate stratus of existence.

The Deep Air

2011-01-19T04:19:00.002-05:00

What to do when it's 2:30 in the morning and you just don't feel like taking out the trash:

Step 1: Visualize taking out the trash. Step 2: Eat Godiva milk chocolate creme brulee deliciousness. Step 3: Turn on music suitable for taking out trash. Step 4: Take out trash. Step 5: Have a dance party. Step 6: Build a Fruit Pyramid.


Fruit Pyramid: Pommelo, cantaloupe, tangerine, grape

Extraordinary-Ordinary Dichotomy

2011-01-17T15:41:00.000-05:00


Bye Bye Birdies

Ever since I took this picture of pigeons taking off from telephone wires on South Street, I've developed a minor obsession with birds in flight. They are amazing to watch and their behaviors-- especially their innate predilection for formation flying-- are strange. A few days after I caught this shot, I was walking through Rittenhouse Park, and a few pigeons flew down and waddled around my feet. I was amazed that the very same creatures that appeared so magnificent in the air could look so unexceptional and vulgar at ground-level. I wondered if this dichotomy existed in all creatures including us human beings.

Inheritance

2011-01-16T21:57:00.550-05:00

Home from another day of work. Feeling fairly exhausted and strangely accomplished. You would think I was conquering the world, but actually I was just making and serving coffee all day long. Today, however, marks an important day in my training as a barista at LC: I am definitely, indubitably, without a shade of a doubt no longer in training. In fact, since plans for the new shop were announced, a handful of new people have joined the crew, and I, along with my other co-workers, have been doing my share of teaching them the works.

That flip happened a couple weeks ago. It has been fun so far to show the newbies the secrets of the trade: the essential play of teamwork, the need for speed and efficiency, the tricks for making the perfect milk, and of course, our colorful clientele. So far there are three new hires, all very different, and all likable in their own way. I've noticed that we've broken the unintentional tradition of hiring only tall, dark, and...lean males. The new ones are of short to average height. Their backgrounds vary-- a French-speaking Berber/Moroccan, a Canadian, and one all-American boy. One tradition carries on, however-- so far they are all male.

It is a strange fact about this place that both the crew and the clientele are very male-dominated. Whereas women are usually the objectified sex in any given situation, LC is known for its "disarmingly friendly", handsome male baristas. Which is totally fine with me. Moreover, the other day, Sarah made the keen observation that about 70% of the customers that walked through the door were male. Initially she made this observation of gender disparity by simply taking a look around, but then we designed an impromptu experiment by keeping a Male vs. Female tally on my coffee cup of all the customers that walked through the door for the next quarter-of-an-hour. Boy, was she onto something. What was it about this place that made it a male magnet?

With regards to the male-dominated crew, I don't understand the gender bend myself, but in my short time at the shop, I've always felt a dependency on the guys-- not because they were guys, but simply because they've been here for 2, 3, 13 years and are so impressively good at their job. I would watch my co-workers either from the sidelines (in the back kitchen) or at the register while I'm handling the business side of the job, and be in awe of their ability to remember so many drink orders in one go, their speed at making the drinks often even before the orders are placed, and above all their ability to keep cool and even hold conversations with the customers under the chaos of long lines that at times go out the door and don't ever end throughout the entire 6-hour shift. It occurs to me now that it's not the guys themselves that are impressive, but rather the job that makes them impressive.

Today, however, for the first time there was no guy behind the bar. It was just Amy and I. Well, one of the new trainees was there, but the main team was made up of two girls who had worked at LC for not even a year. By now, I've had some practice holding my own under the machines, but when the line got too long and I started forgetting and mixing up orders, I would just toss the job back to my co-worker and he would expertly kill the line. This time, though, I had no one to toss the job to in case it got too chaotic. In fact, the job was tossed to me and Amy. The Berber was put on the register for the day. As our manager put it, Amy and I "have been here a longer time and are next in line to inherit the machines." Inherit the machines. I liked the sound of that.

We transitioned into the afternoon shift and it was like someone pressed the power button on a machine, setting it in motion, and never came back to turn it off. I felt like I barely looked up from the machines and pitchers for the first four hours of my 6-hour shift. At one point, I found myself wishing for some face time with the customers, so I put the Berber on the machines for practice and went back to my old comfortable position at the register. Eventually, however, the line got too long so we had to switch back. Later, the Berber came back from a break in the kitchen sidelines.

"I don't know how you guys stay so calm," said he. I had to smile at that because I understood exactly what it must look like to him, this two-man machine. I replied with a truth I had discovered on the job: "You have no choice but to stay calm. If you go crazy on top of all this craziness, than it wouldn't work. It would be an impossibility."

Despite my growing comfort with the job, I've still yet to figure out the multitasking art of talking to people while I'm on the machines. I assume that once you've been doing the machines for a couple years, it become second nature and you can then put your mind on other things like the people in front of you waiting for their drinks. A trick that I learned from Sticks this past Saturday is that a shot takes about the same time to pull as the milk takes to pour and steam, so instead of constantly peering over to see if the shot is finished while you're stuck at the steaming wand, you can assume that it will be finished pulling around the same time or just after the milk is finished steaming. Thus, the best order of action at the machines would be the following: pull the shots, steam the milk, and there, while your steaming is where you can look out into your audience of caffeine-craving customers and either hold a conversation or take the next order. That can happen once you don't need to think to steam good milk. Hmmm, so much to do...

Toward evening, the loud buzz of conversation finally caught my ears. There are times when the cafe can become really quiet, but those times are rare, and today was not one of those days. This evening, the cafe was humming with life and connection that was not wifi, but human. As much as our customers are annoyed by the fact that we refuse to carry wifi, and as much as I understand their annoyance, I also realize that it is a gift. It is one of the not-so-secret ingredients that helped to create this cafe wonder and continues to define it. While cleaning, I suddenly became aware of the medley of human voices that rose quite above the monotonous bass notes of the cafe music. I peered between the display case and giant vase of flowers and the sight gave me pause: every seat was filled, and everyone was engaged. I saw a couple with fingers interlaced, elbows propped on the wooden table; another couple, he was tenderly stroking her hair. I saw two regulars holding some sort of debate that looked pretty serious. Others were engaged in lighter conversation, in groups of 2, 3, 4. Part of me wondered what they were all talking about, but the other part of me didn't care. It was an exotically beautiful sight to behold.

Passageways

2011-01-05T14:42:00.002-05:00

Monday evening, I stepped into the stairwell leading to the studio and sighed with happiness. Too many days had passed since I'd seen these dirty khaki-colored stairs and bare walls. I began the ritualistic climb up the stairs, and happily rid myself of the delusion that I had a life and purpose outside of ballet-- a lie I've been telling myself for the past ten days. Piano music drifted down from the studio. I noted that the painting of the T-rex exhilaratingly riding a bike against a purple background was still propped against the wall on the second landing. The tree we had used for the Nutcracker production stood nearby unornamented. After the second set of stairs, I followed the cranes the rest of the way into the studio, a world of its own. Passageways, doors and frames create the feeling of going on a journey, or leaving one world and entering another.

Annual State of the Self Address

2010-12-04T02:41:00.001-05:00

It is December, and I've been working at LC for almost half a year now. Today, for the first time ever, I heard the Penniless Picasso laughing...It was the funniest laugh I've ever heard. It sounded like someone pretending to cry-- like an actor's mock-crying--, and it went on and on and on. It took me a minute to look over the register to see who was making such a racket and find out it was dear old B. I wondered what he was laughing at, and whether it merited such a laugh. I wondered what in the world could merit such a laugh. Last week, he gave me a 9th painting. I hung it up on my "Bartwork Wall" when I got home this evening, and lay on my floor studying it and the others, searching for cohesive elements and hints to his unusual inner world. It is nice to have meaningful artwork coloring my walls. I've been told it's a bad idea to write on the paintings and put holes in them because they might be worth something in the future, but I've done both, as I have no plans to sell them ever.

Once again, it is December, which means the year is almost out. I had some grand plans for 2010 back in January, and of course, most of them have not panned out. Some have though! More than anything, this past year has been defined by ballet (an understatement!). Now ballet defines me. This art form has brought such joys, pains, purpose, and multitudinous other dimensions to my life, none of which I could have predicted when I first stepped into the old studio on Sansom Street last October. A year later, I am transformed both outwardly and inwardly. A year later, I will be dancing the role of Clara in The Nutcracker in front of an audience of 4-to-9-year-olds at a nearby elementary school. A year later, I have come to know what it means to feel passionate about something, and driven. I have never felt either of those before all throughout college or ever in my entire life until this past year of ballet. For that and everything else that ballet has given me, I am eternally, utterly grateful.

The one problem that ballet has brought me is the conflict between staying and leaving. Virtually this entire year was spent in daily agony over the loss of my travel plans. After my year in the Mideast, I had a desperate need to see the rest of the world, but then ballet came along and tied me down to Philly of all places and annihilated all my plans to satisfy my wanderlust. Enter perpetual inner conflict. Now I have many things to stay for (mainly ballet and my job), and in the past couple months, the choices I'd made so haphazardly finally feel "right"-- like actual choices, not random draws due to indecision, ambiguous feelings, and impulsiveness. A couple days ago, however, I had a sudden realization that there are interesting places to visit in my own backyard-- places which I can actually afford to go to, for which I would not have to shell out a grand for the plane ticket alone. This evening, as I sat on the couch researching this idea, a memory came to me of an article I had read months ago about Nicaraguan Sign Language. And thus, an idea was born, of a pilgrimage...an awesome, nerdy, linguistic pilgrimage that will shape the coming year, and perhaps the years following. Who know what discoveries will come of this pilgrimage!

Between my colorful workplace and ballet-- and the mouse that lives in our house and my imaginative roommates-- I feel as if I am living a story (not storybook, mind). Work is more than just work, the studio is more than just a place to dance. Life has become organic and meaningful.

Mission 11/17/2010

2010-11-17T01:43:00.001-05:00

Make dinner for roomies + my new friend Naama.

-Acorn squash is delicious. Peel the rind off though. Thanks for the advice, Sarah!
-I forgot to squeeze the lime juice into the chili-lime vinaigrette. So it was just chili-...vinaigrette.
-There IS a difference between les haricots verts (French green beans) and regular green beans. The latter is more beany; the former is more leafy.
-If the recipe says use ice water, do not substitute "very cold tap water". The ice makes for a flakier crust for your Alsatian onion tart.
-However long you think it will take to cook a big dinner, double that time (at least). We ended up eating at 10pm instead of the appointed start time of 8pm.
-Cheez-its make a great dessert. I drew a mouse on my emptied plate with sriracha sauce and fed it a crumbled up square of Cheez-it. The real Hamouse, our newest house pet, never showed up, though he had been invited. His prolonged absence is disconcerting. It is likely that he is busying himself with building more cheese bombs. Also, there is a fish in the house, and no one knew except for Kathleen because it is in her room.
-I love our house and the residents of our house and my new friend.
-Opened with Goosebumps today. Made a double leaf! Aw yeah...right in front of the Master Barista, too! Happiness abounds. A tiny baby boy with a tiny bald head came in for a coffee. His pajamas matched my socks. We were green-&-blue stripe buddies!

Babies

2010-11-12T01:21:00.001-05:00

Once you are out of school, you have to give yourself assignments.

Walking home from ballet with a female classmate much older than I. She was going home to a husband of 37 years of marriage this December.

"Wow, congratulations!" I meant it. "I wish that upon myself."

"Oh, it'll happen! You've got to marry your best friend."

The simplicity of the advice is striking. And so sensible, too...I do hope my best friend is not a dog. Sometimes I think it might be a baby. I spent an hour in the children's section at the bookstore "studying", which is Arabic for "playing with babies". Being a baby is so exciting. You get to throw fistfuls of autumn leaves into the air for the first time. You get to alternatively give and take contents of your mother's wallet to a stranger over and over again, with increasing delight. You get to explore everything from books to feet with your teeth...even if you don't have any yet. Everything is amazing and new, and you are adorable just because you are so small and alien-looking and acting and because you walk funny...if you can even walk yet. Hah! Babies...

New Perfume

2010-11-06T23:38:00.003-04:00

I smell like work..."caramel, nutty, and fragrant". Or is it "uncommon, rich, and full"? Whatever the particular coffee smell, it's in my hair, in my clothes, on my hands, and in my very skin. The grounds are stuck under my nails, too. Every time I grind a bag of beans, and shake it down to settle the grounds in the bag, I like to imagine the tiny brown particles flying all over my face and in the air like an earthy, organic pixie dust. It's no wonder I come home smelling like I do. Today, my co-worker and I took turns being latte-making machines. The line of customers did not clear until three hours into our shift, and only for a minute then before the next wave began. Wow...as a newbie, I'm still wowed by this.

"How do you say 'factory' in French?"
"Usine."
"Je suis une usine!"

Rhythm in Work

2010-10-27T23:34:00.000-04:00

A facebook friend just tagged a dead man in one of my photos. I didn't even know of his existence, or that I had "seen" him without really seeing him before. But there he was in my photo-- two of my photos actually--, and now he has passed on after his body was hit by a car a couple days ago. Strange feelings abound. I memorialized a man with my camera. Just coming out of a photography moratorium, I am driven once more to pursue this line of work/art.

Work is wonderful. There are moments when customers get on my nerves, but for the most part, I consider myself lucky to be behind that bar. It's getting busier and busier as the season progresses into winter, so it's good that I am getting better and better at hitting a stride with my regular weekend co-worker. Last week, during a very busy shift, I was facing the machine pulling shots when suddenly I heard a woman's voice behind me say "It's like a ballet!" This made me look up and come out of a "zone" that I hadn't even realized I'd been in until that moment. I saw that we were being watched like performers on a stage by our customers as they waited for their drinks. Apart from the usual compliments about our coffee and service, this had to be my favorite customer comment of all time. Rather than a ballet, working behind the bar when it is super busy can feel like being on a swing. The rhythm of teamwork is tangible. It is the presence of rhythm in a given process that makes it comparable to an art like dance or music.

It occurred to me later that night that the entire process of working behind the bar at LC is a creation from nothing. There was no absolute rule that governed the process of making and serving coffee; no rule that placed one at the register and the other at the machines; no rule that governed how to deal with dirty dishes and spoons; no rule that detailed how the person at the register was supposed to assist the person at the machines and vice versa, and when. And so on. Nothing had to be the way it was, but because of the way the machines and other equipment were set up, and the given roles and the way the roles were trained to interact, a process was created that eventually came to be regarded as a dance by one customer.

A New Friend

2010-10-23T05:44:00.001-04:00

I picked up the cello last night. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful...friendship.

If there's a cello lying around the house, one should learn to play it, yes? Yes indeed!

I struck my first note (a low C). "It sounds like a boat!" were the first words that flew out of my mouth.

Who picks up the cello at the age of 26? But then again, who picks up ballet at the age of 25? I, I.

I begin with Bach's Suite. It's gonna be my one-hit wonder.

Immunized & Primal

2010-10-20T05:56:00.001-04:00

Longtime customer of LC wanders into the back kitchen. "Hey, do you need a flu shot?"

Thisyear, I got immunized while perched atop the metal milk repository inthe back kitchen of my coffeeshop. This is the best health care I'vehad since turning 18. After getting injected, I went back to chowingdown on the most delicious falafel I've ever had.

Todaywas a good day. I got to open with Goosebumps. Endowed with anincredible ability to read my mind and mood, he makes me feel safe andtaken care of. As soon as he goes on break to chow down on his ownfalafel, I set the pot of coffee dripping into the to-go cup, andforgot to watch it while grinding beans and ringing up the register.Coffee flowed all over the counter.

The day just gotbetter as it aged into night. I was on my A-game in the best modernjazz class I've had yet. The teacher had beautiful form--simultaneously powerful and dainty--, she didn't fuck around, shenitpicked, and she broke down the steps in an easily digestible way.The music was haunting and moving, and the choreography style was veryKoresh-- lyrical and primal. Always the touch of jungle fever.

Balletnever leaves my bones, but here, in a modern class, it was important tomove more instinctively. Also important to associate key movements withcount as Kip always reminds us and not try to fix everything at onceand consequently get overwhelmed and lost.

As I walked home from my usual evening study hall at the gelato shop, I swung the world by the tail and bounced over the white clouds, a la Allison Krauss and Robert Plant.

Red-Eyed Tree Frog

2010-10-07T00:44:00.001-04:00

Why you should be fascinated by red-eyed tree frogs:

(a) They are living mood rings. Normally a bright lurid lime green, depending on their mood they can change to dark green or a reddish-brown. Obviously, frogs only have three kinds of moods: happy, sad, and jumpy! Besides the green, their sides are striped by blue and white bands, and their feet are red or orange. They really are beautiful creatures.

(b) Sometimes, they eat smaller frogs. Can you imagine if humans ate smaller human beings? I would not live to tell the tale.

(c) They (and frogs in general) are an indicator species. Because of their ultra-sensitivity to changes in their environment, if anything is wrong, frogs are the first to feel the effects. If you hear less ribbiting at night, it means your ecosystem is not so healthy.

(d) Contrary to what their freakishly red eyes might lead you to believe, they are not poisonous. The color is used as a startling mechanism.

(e) They look funny and adorable. Bulging eyes, wide mouth, flat head...cuter than your average chihuahua.

I became curious about red-eyed tree frogs after a meeting at my coffeeshop with a Rainforest Alliance representative. The meeting was casual, yet informative, and now I know what to tell my customers when they ask if our beans are "Fair Trade certified". Answer: "No, but we are Rainforest Alliance certified. Check out the cute froggie sticker on our packaging!"

H Sound

2010-10-05T05:16:00.000-04:00

Semitic languages are so interesting in both structure and sound. Ilove the deep throaty H sound of Arabic (like the sound you make whenblowing on your glasses before wiping them). Such a beautiful, breathy,yet full sound coming from deep within. It's a shame the Englishlanguage lacks such a sound.

Initiated

2010-10-04T23:39:00.024-04:00

I just worked my 5th shift in a row at LC. I feel like a real barista now, especially since during this last shift, Handlebars entrusted me with making the drinks for half the time. Also during this last shift, one of the signature ceramic cups shattered and drew blood from my right middle finger. I feel initiated. Welcome to the LC baristahood, Angie Chung.

Union

2010-10-03T23:05:00.009-04:00

How strange! I can hear my heart beating through my ipod! My heartbeatmelds with the strains of Tchaikovky's Violin Concerto. This piece ofmusic is so unbelievably gorgeous and exalting at times that it makesme want to scream or cry-- or some other form of release from thiscorpus cage.

Consumed

2010-10-02T05:36:00.009-04:00

Lately, I've been struck with this fine idea that I'm spending thenext few years or many years in anticipation and preparation for thehomecoming of whoever I'm destined to be with. It's a wonderful idea.I'm not wondering, I'm simply waiting. The difference is the element ofinevitability contained in the latter, and the lack of it in theformer.

In the meantime, my study of ballet has taken ona level of seriousness that I never would have predicted not a yearago. I go to class nearly every day, practice and stretch for anotherhour (sometimes more) after each class, then go to my favorite gelatopalace to take notes and think about ballet forawhile before cracking opening my Arabic book. It's become ratherobsessive, I admit, and all-consuming. Absolute bliss.

Becauseof this all-consuming dedication to ballet, I am left with little timefor socializing, and so find myself leading a rather solitary life oflate. In another lifetime, this would have bothered me greatly, butnowadays, I am driven more by a sense of purpose than by a desire forcamaraderie. It's a different sort of fun.

Fleeting Faces

2010-09-13T04:59:00.000-04:00

A couple days ago, I ran by a figure sitting onher stoop and was momentarily terrified. I could not figure out how herhead was positioned, and so what I took for her face appeared deformed,like that of a monster. I stared and stared trying to locate herfeatures until I ran right past her and the monster became human. Justan old woman with her head twisted sideways away from me, leaning onone hand. Phew.

A couple days ago, I attended alecture at the Kimmel Center featuring Philip Glass and LucindaChilds-- minimalist artists of the post-modern age. Lucinda heldherself gracefully, was slender as a paper doll it seemed. Her veinsstood out prominently, snaking down her long, thin, wrinkled arms and ended inlarge, beautiful hands with long, thin fingers that gestured elegantlyin the air as she spoke. Her permanently knit eyebrows gave her face ahawkish look that was softened, however, by her gentle smile. Whenevershe looked toward her right, in Philip's direction, half of her hawkishface was cast in shadow, the other half lit by stage light. I took amental picture. In hearing a reference to her "silent pieces", sheamended the term, saying they weren't quite silent as you could hearthe pitter-patter of the dancer's feet on the stage. I loved that.

First Sound

2010-09-12T09:31:00.002-04:00

I woke up to the sound of rain falling. It was the first thing I was conscious of...way before opening my eyes. It fell heavily, steadily. It was so beautiful...Love mornings.

Snowballing

2010-09-10T11:51:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, when I read the news, I get the feeling that the stability of our race is hanging by a very fine thread. It's rather like an elephant balancing on a pebble. Or a marshmallow peep stuck in the microwave with the seconds counting down. I believe religious tolerance is key to maintaining this precarious balance, but it's the smallest incident that could snowball into something horrifically damaging on a global scale.

Who (besides da Vinci and Nostradamus) could have foreseen that the actions of a tiny church in Florida would lead to actual deaths in faraway Afghanistan? That is a very scary demonstration of cause-and-effect. Incidents like the planned Qur'an burning and that infamous Danish cartoon a few years back are just small ripples in a sea that is quietly seething underneath.

So which is it gonna be, religious strife or nuclear warfare, that finally puts an end to us? Stay tuned!

Tolstoyan Euphemism

2010-09-10T07:50:00.001-04:00

Tolstoy's preferred euphemism for "to make battle/war" is "to chop and hack at each other" (Constance Garnett translation). He's a man of 4-lettered words.

And yes (as my fellow early-riser roommate pointed out), I am spending the good morning eating challah and reading War & Peace. Shana Tovah to all, and to all a good morning.

This Good Morning

2010-09-10T06:50:00.001-04:00

Good morning! Good morning! It's the turn of the season and of a new day, and the possibilities seem endless. Who knows what this day will bring? What people I will encounter? Could be good, could be bad, could be LIFE CHANGING. Could be the love of my life. Could be ballet...Could be a greasy, cheesy, fatty burger. Could be a new feeling or a brand new idea. An alien might sweep me away, or I will sweep IT away into the vast possibilities of my new day. Already the birds are chirping! There go the possibilities of birds not chirping into my morning. An airplane drones in the distance. It has marked the sky and my morning. A rattle of tools, voices carrying indistinguishable words, a truck starts, the birds continue to chirp, my purple curtain ripples as the autumn breeze blows softly into my good morning. It is fresh! I must go and mark my morning.

Infinite Yet Bounded

2010-09-06T02:58:00.002-04:00

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep
The more I give to thee, the more I have
For both are infinite.

I have a theory about love. People say that love is infinite, but I don't think this is quite true. I think it is infinite so long as all your love is given to one person. But once you start loving more than one person, you begin to realize the finite qualities of love. I think you can love each person infinitely, but the overall amount of love that you can give in total is quite finite. This theory may be nearly as confusing as the fact that the universe is infinitely huge, yet bounded.

It is 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm babbling incoherently about something that can never be pinned down, about an ever-elusive butterfly.

Rhythm of Life

2010-09-06T02:40:00.002-04:00

I just realized that for the past 2.5 months, I've spent 6 hours a day, 3-5 days a week in a narrow 2.5-foot-wide space with whichever co-worker I happened to be scheduled with for that shift. That's a lot of hours in such a narrow space, and yet, I don't ever feel confined.

To be sharing that tiny space with another person is an interesting and new experience. It becomes essential to say "behind you" every time you pass behind your co-worker, no matter how repetitive it may seem (and I did feel like a broken record at first, but got used to it eventually).

It also becomes essential to know when to step in and help out in making drinks rather than manning the register (the business side of the job). I didn't get the hang of this until I began taking over the drink-making here and there and realized how many orders a barista can take before he or she becomes overwhelmed. Now I sort of get it, though it's not quite perfect yet.

When I do get the hang of it though, it feels rather nice because I hit a sort of rhythm with my co-worker and it becomes a partnership, or if you prefer more poetic imagery-- a dance. Working in this narrow space behind the bar has made me realize that there are rhythms to situations in life that don't explicitly involve dancing or music.

This evening, just a few minutes before closing, I looked out the window and saw dozens of naked men and women riding by on bicycles.

"Oh my god, it's the Naked Bike Ride!" I cried. Customers turned from their coffee to the windows, and my co-workers and I rushed over to the edge of the counter nearest the window and gaped at the mass of pale buttcheeks sitting atop bike seats, riding by with cheers and whoops. We gaped and gaped and I felt strangely uncomfortably at seeing strange men's dicks hanging out in the open.

The Penniless Picasso gave me another drawing today-- the 4th one so far. I love our Penniless Picasso. I still haven't told you what he said to me the other day, have I? Story for another post. Suffice to say that tonight, due to no particular reason, or perhaps due to several reasons at once, I am full of seemingly imperturbable happiness and love. As well, a piece of rabbit sits in my stomach (a consequence of dinner). I'm feeling jumpy.

Modern Jazz

2010-09-02T02:34:00.001-04:00

Symmetry is closed on holiday for the rest of the week, and so I decided on a whim (and an invite) to take a jazz class at Koresh. I had no dance clothes-- not even a hair tie-- so I danced in denim capris and borrowed a hair tie from the girl at the front desk.

The class was lovely. I was surprised by a few things:

1) By how balletic the moves were. We used balletic arms (port-de-bras) and degages in warm-up, changements across the floor, and coupes and pas-de-bourres in the dance combination. Most pronouncedly, the teacher himself moved and carried himself with balletic grace, even when he was teaching a "jazzy" move.

2) By the lyrical quality of the dance. I was expecting jazz walks and such, but there was nothing of a sort. Throughout the class, we were continually falling into gravity, using natural momentum, never fighting against what felt natural. I think I am by nature a jumper and so I tend to spring up rather than fall into the ground by default. I had to work to fall into the arabesque instead of bouncing out of it.

3) By how much fun I had. In continually falling into gravity and using my natural momentum while dancing, I felt so utterly free. I walked home feeling like I'd been playing on a swing for an hour-and-half. I adore swings.

4) By how much of my nearly-yearlong training at Symmetry came into use in this jazz class. As I balanced on releve/high-pose, changement'ed across the floor, and simply every time I moved, I felt all my learning from the past year coming into play. What a worthwhile year it's been!

5) By how much I loved dancing in bare feet.

First Leaf and Tolstoy's Fundamental Theorem of History

2010-08-24T22:22:00.004-04:00

"Beautiful," said the LC customer as I set his latte on the bar.

"Sure is...You were talking about the coffee, right?"

"The whole process. It's a beautiful thing to watch."

I felt pleased. I recalled for an instant what it was like on the other side of the bar, to have no idea of the difference between a cappuccino, a latte, a macchiato, and so on. To be amazed at the gorgeous foam and the complex leaf designs. Oh wait, it's only been two months since I've started working at LC, and I still am very much amazed by the leaf design! I made my first baby leaf on a latte last Sunday, and it really was a beautiful thing. My hand was going for a heart, then at the last minute, it did the side-to-side dance as if possessed by a will of its own, and suddenly, a small baby leaf sat atop the brown like a tattoo, curving with the rim of the cup.

Today, I watched as my co-worker, Handlebars, created leaf after leaf after leaf, and each time I watched amazed and tried to figure out how he made it look so nice. His leaves are especially circular and wider at the base with many thin prongs. My latte milk was not so on today. It's all about getting the right milk-- not too foamy, not to wet. The design will come of its own accord, as they all have been telling me since the beginning.

I know I can't be serving coffee at LC forever (and why not?). I know I cannot be doing ballet at Symmetry forever (and why not??). But for now, let us appreciate and count our lucky stars that Angie gets to do both, day in and day out. Yesterday was the first day back at Symmetry after a week-long hiatus, and boy was it lovely! I had missed our teacher entirely too much. After the horrid, abyss-like Dark Age of Symmetry, whenever there is an extended hiatus at the studio lasting more than a couple days, it always starts to feel like a thing of the past, and that is a very melancholy feeling indeed.

Ultimately, life is a sad affair because everything good and nice will come to an end, and this summer has been especially good and nice (in fact, 2010 has been the hands-down the best summer I've ever lived in my 26 years). Pardon me if I sound depressing but sometimes these thoughts do occur in my otherwise obliviously blissful mind. I feel like Gilgamesh coming to terms with his mortality. Or like myself coming to terms with the fact that Prince Andrey and Natasha will not live happily ever after and grow old and curmudgeonly together. And Why Not???

Because Tolstoy says so, and he is the master of their fate, fictional as they are.

Tolstoy espouses an interesting view of fate, which goes something like...we are each of us free to make our own decisions, but once we do, our resulting fate is tied to the rest of mankind and history. Mathematically-- logically, it appears to make little to no sense. That is until one reaches page 937 of War & Peace:

"The progress of humanity, arising from an innumerable multitude of individual wills, is continuous in its motion...Only by assuming an infinitely small unit for observation--a differential of history--that is, the homogeneous tendencies of men, and arriving at the integral calculus (that is, taking the sum of those infinitesimal quantities), can we hope to arrive at the laws of history."

You see how hilarious this guy is? He applies complex laws of mathematics to discussions of fate! For all the ways in which he makes fun of Germans and their irrationally pig-headed faith in the sciences, he sure does enjoy using logic to pound his views home. Hey, Roomie, you see now why I burst out laughing when I read the above statement? It happens* to read very much like a typical math theorem from my old analysis textbook (I've added the bold fonts to emphasize the likeness). I laugh because I've finally discovered the reason for the existence of my math degree-- and it is to understand Russian literature. Thank you Tolstoy for giving purpose to my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.

*coincidence? I think not! I'm sure Tolstoy did his research into actual calculus textbooks.

Day of Rest

2010-08-23T10:46:00.001-04:00

Ah Monday, my weekend! I could conquer the world! ...or I could conquer my bed. For now, I lie upside down on my couch-- barefoot and in the shirt I wore to work yesterday-- reading about Napoleon's attempt to conquer the world. Long live vicariously!

Any Given Sunday

2010-08-15T11:22:00.002-04:00

Now that it's cooled down a bit in Philly, we've taken to turning off the AC and turning on the windows again. Oh how I've missed the noise. Earlier this morning, a car drove by blaring Middle Eastern music-- the kind with the lone voice trailing like a call-to-prayer-- and for a few seconds, I thought I was in the mountains again. Then the Doppler Effect flattened it out and took it away.

Now, a couple hours later, an outdoor church service with a big brass band keeps me from sleeping in. The priest calls me to Jesus and the Lord, his voice magnified by his zeal and a microphone. The pace and volume of the music crescendos, the shouts of "Glory!" increase in frequency. They're going for the goal! I'm anticipating...

...

...

Barista Talk

2010-08-14T00:53:00.005-04:00

"Oh, by the way Angie, do you have kids?"

"KIDS? Do I look like I would have kids? I have Minnie Mouse on my shirt! In the front AND the back!"

"Not kids- keys! Why does everyone think I'm saying kids?"

"Oh...yes. I do."

Later...

"So you don't have any kids?"

"No but I do have a snowman. His name is Jellybean and he has a rainbow scarf. I sleep with him every night."

On His Toes

2010-08-13T22:32:00.000-04:00

Today, after morning class, I lay on the floor stretching and watching Kip teach the following pointe class. Usually, he gives directions while perched on his stool at the front of the class. Today, though, he stood himself in pointe shoes and led the students into exercises. Kip in flowing army-green pants and satin pink toe shoes, leading a pack of lesser mortals into ballet exercises? I'm so done looking at women in toe shoes. I was struck by the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine: cold, hard green against soft, reflective pink; rippling, billowing fabric against the boxy hardness of pointe shoes; Kip in toe shoes. Gorgeous, gorgeous.

Night

2010-08-12T11:41:00.009-04:00

Tonight, K called his style of teaching a "dying breed". It is an old style of teaching that treats ballet as the conceptual art that it is. Its poses and moves are motivated by abstract concepts, ideal shapes and consideration of perspective from audiences real or imagined.

As a dancer in training, one could go through the entire training process successfully without knowing or giving a damn about these more elevated aspects of ballet. Technically, one need not know that the aim of the arabesque is to give the illusion of an "inverted firmament"-- a curved line extending infinitely into space-- in order to achieve the pose. The imagery is admittedly "lofty", but then again, I've always been attracted by lofty ideas. What could be more lofty than the studies of relativity and mathematics? But in ballet as in math, one can learn to perform the functions and operations without understanding their deeper significances, and that is perfectly fine.

In terms of mathematics, this doing without knowing would be like being told that sqrt (2) is irrational and learning even to perform operations on irrational numbers without ever having seen the proof that sqrt (2) is irrational. Is it necessary to see the proof? Not in the least. But does seeing or better yet deriving the proof bring one's understanding and appreciation of mathematics to a whole new level? Indubitably. The lack of understanding of the motivations behind moves seems to be the case in most ballet studios: one learns to execute the moves without knowing why. It becomes a "gymnastic feat" rather than art.

Tonight, I was reminded of why I was here in Philadelphia. It is within the walls of the studio on 19th in Chestnut that the art of ballet is endowed with a special spirit and rigor that is hard to find elsewhere in the country and most of the world. And moreover, my instructor seems to believe in the goodness of human beings despite having seen the detritus-- the most banal examples of our race. In fact, it is one of the most interesting and inexplicable aspects of K's personality, that he is drawn to and seems to interact most comfortably with the kinds of characters that the rest of society shuns due to their obvious deficiencies in morals, mental soundness, or other typically valued human traits. I can only theorize that he does so because he himself understands what it is like to be shunned especially having come from the viciously competitive and egocentric world of ballet.

And yet, despite everything-- despite having decided he hated ballet because of its musty museum piece-like quality, and despite having experienced the worst human behavior in the very world he represents, he continues to teach ballet precisely because in his opinion, it takes the best parts of being human and displays them in unconscionably beautiful forms, whether static or dynamic. Now that I think about it, I feel extremely lucky that as a mere student of ballet not aiming to make it a profession, I will only ever expose myself to the good and beautiful side of ballet and not the dirty side. Unfortunately we cannot be so blissfully naive about our actual professions.

Tonight after ballet class, as I walked through the city streets in the dimness of night and balmy summer air, dwarfed by massive skyscrapers reaching to the heavens, I came to the realization that I've been wrong in thinking I needed to find apurpose to support my ballet habit which brings me so much happiness.My happiness is my purpose, and I don't need anything more. Evenphotography is superfluous.

While walking through the dim, muted streets of Center City surrounded by towering skyscrapers, I recalled a few nights ago how I had gone for a close-to-midnight walk with my camera and wandered into the most unearthly scene of children and lovers, friends, mothers and grandmothers playing in an enormous fountain shooting out magnificent jets of illuminated water like liquid moonlight. On the other hand, homeless folk lay on the benches and grass covered in thin white sheets like the dead.

The two children, years later, will remember nothing but a great big fountain, jets of water spraying in their faces, marble statues bigger than life, and pearl-colored water arcing into the limitless navy sky like white rainbows. For them, nothing will exist outside of this fountain at least in their memories. The grown-ups on the other hand will very well remember that an entire city lay outside of this fountain-- the Moore building, the Franklin Institute, City Hall in the distance, the homeless closer by. The next night, I awoke at three in the morning with the word "kinderspiel (child's play)" bouncing around in my head, and obeyed a sudden urge to take night shots from my rooftop.

Tonight after ballet class, about a block from the El on the way to a tango practica in Fishtown, I would see an owl on a rooftop, hoot at it to see if it was really an owl, and then continue on wondering if it was good luck or bad luck to spot an owl in the night. When night falls, everything becomes a little bit more mysterious and magical.

Horseshoes Milonga

2010-08-01T12:36:00.000-04:00

I walked out of the subway station and heard the clopping of horseshoes. Out of the night appeared a carriage pulled by a lone white horse. It was one of those cheesy tourist horse-and-carriage rides. I hailed it like a cab and the driver pulled over asking if I needed a ride. I accepted duly noting that the driver was female-- Rule #2 in the Hitchhiker's Guide for Girls. Rule #1 would be "No hitchhiking in the middle of the night, especially in shady neighborhoods like Fishtown. But that's a hard one to follow, I find, whether I'm in Fishtown, Seattle, or Lebanon.

And so I found myself behind led by way of horse through the main streets, and then through the back alleys of Fishtown that I usually do my best to avoid. That night though, while the driver chatted amiably about how she'd been working this job for the past two decades, I found the view from behind fences and shadowy growth of trees impossibly romantic. The smell of sawdust alerted me that she was close to home, but she continued on until we were about one shady block from the back of the tango studio. Here she let me off and told me which way to go, waving away my money. I thanked her and ran off for I was already fairly late, climbed into and wended my way through the Field of Absurd Objects, and eventually approached the front window where the now-familiar sight of men and women dancing in intimate embrace met my eyes.

Here's a secret about tango dance events: the best time of any milonga is at the very end of the night at around 2am, usually. By this time the general crowd has gone home, and so the atmosphere is intimate, less chaotic. Poetic. Gorgeous strains of Piazzolla are played specially at this time. Only the really serious dancers are left. Meredith, Andres and Damian finally dance.

A couple stands at the doorway leading to Jerry's apartment looking out at these remnant dancers. A heavyset couple, his arm around her waist, her arm around his waist. Their heads form a window; through this space between the couple, in the distance, I see Damian and his partner waiting for the cue to start dancing, wreathed by the periwinkle blue Christmas lights framing the studio's window. I move past the couple and over to the piano. Nearby, Andres leads Meredith into a ridiculous number of spins that look ridiculously fun. She stumbles and laughs, then recovers and spins again. They move along in the line of dance.

Next comes Kristin and John, he'd finally nervously and hilariously worked up the nerve to ask her for a dance. I had been sitting between them in Jerry's apartment in the back of the studio, and it had been like watching high school. Or middle school. Only he was 24 and she in her 40's with a child. At tango, there are a number of women who dress and carry themselves in a way that belies their true age by a decade, sometimes two. I find myself chatting with Kristin about the worth of having a child. She is different from my older friends who do not have children. I think in becoming a mother, what you lose in lightness of spirit, you gain in putting aside superficialities and...yourself.

Carolyn walks in dressed to the nines in a champagne pink form-fitting satiny dress-- a dress she bought more than ten years ago with a custom-made slit on the sides. She is Walking Elegance. Someone should stop time so she will never change. But someone probably had the same thought about her when she was in her 20's and now she's even more beautiful-- and wiser, and a better baker. She had catered the entire menu that night. She says goodbye to us, brushing cheeks one-by-one. She leaves.

Ori walks in, high on life as usual. He had promised Elinora Ballerina a dance and had never followed through. Such is Ori. I watch the two of them communicating. She communicates with intimacy, no matter who she is with. I like, I like. John reasserts himself:

"It's one of those days where...where...where..."

We waited. He blew air under his bangs in frustration as we mocked him playfully as he struggled to get his words out.

"It's one of those days where everything should have gone perfectly,...but didn't! I wish I could do this day over again!"

"Hi, my name's Angie, nice to meet you!" We shook hands again. Before the night is over (just barely), I see them on the floor together in the line of dance.

My Island

2010-07-31T10:21:00.001-04:00

If I had an island, I would name it "Noman". No man is an island entire of itself...

If I had a photography business, I would call it "Yellow Sky". Yellow sky. Interesting choice...You can't see colors, can you?

Shift #10 Behind the Bar

2010-07-23T23:23:00.000-04:00

By the way, I made beautiful microfoam today. The beautiful microfoam translated into a beautiful cappuccino for an anonymous customer at LC. Love coffee. Love ballet. Love life.

Belly Button Awareness

2010-07-23T23:00:00.000-04:00

Belly button awareness is key to maintaining balance in ballet. In this morning's ballet class, I imagined my belly button being pulled by a thread hanging from the ceiling, then traveling slowly up my spine, past the nape of my neck, all the way through the top of my head. We used this imagery to maintain our balance as we slowly rolled up from a forward cambre on sous-sous (on our toes) back into the upright position. How strange it was to see my belly button hanging above my head, rather like a perverse mistletoe.

In ballet, the line between the imaginary and real, the intangible and tangible, the abstract and concrete is crossed so often that I find myself questioning the relative importance we place on the real, tangible, and concrete. Many concepts like balance are so far above our understanding (ie: difficult to attain) that they are best explored through imagery and visualization of more easily-known concepts like mobilized belly buttons or a docked boat pulling away or moving, tangible energy. Similarly, concepts in physics and math are often only understood through imagery and mappings (to concepts already understood) because they so far exceed the functional limits of human cognizance. It is easy to dismiss the imaginary because of its intangible nature, but the preponderance of imagery and mappings in math, science, literature, dance, and in our very language even just goes to show how heavily we actually rely on it as a tool for understanding the oh-so-important "real world".

Eat Sleep Breathe

2010-07-20T19:33:00.000-04:00

Go to ballet.

Sleep in ballet clothes.

Wake up in ballet clothes.

Go back to ballet.

A more pleasing cycle I can hardly think of! Although the Krebs cycle comes pretty close.

Philly has been blessed with the usual amount of thunderstorms this summer. Normally I would have nothing good to say about thunderstorms, but last night, while the thunder clapped and rumbled and shook the skies and rain pounded heavily on the rooftop, I was caught in a bubble of warm yellow and rose-colored light, doing slow grand plies and cambres to the strains of classical piano music. The juxtaposition of this oasis of warmth against the jarring and frightful sounds-- whose violence, however raging, cannot penetrate my ballet sanctuary-- is sublimely beautiful.

Penniless Picasso

2010-07-17T04:11:00.005-04:00

"You good?"

"No...I think I'm wicked."

So responded La Colombe's very own Picasso, a penniless artist who's been a patron of my workplace since its inception 16 years ago. He's a fixture now, the old whiskered face framed by long, scraggly gray hair hanging from a balding dome, never seen without his sketch pads cradled beneath his arm. He walked in today, approaching the bar with a lost, bewildered, half-crazed look in his eyes. After a minute, he ordered a granita, which I poured for him, though his entire appearance screamed "homeless". He just stood there with his sketchpads under his right arm and stared at the granita without taking it, as if he both feared it and was shocked by its existence. Which is why I asked.

"Don't worry, we'll take care of it," said another regular patron of LC, who himself comes anywhere from zero to 15 times a day. He was sitting with two other regulars at the table right in front of the bar. They were clearly enjoying the show-- the crazy man's mischief and my display of naive ignorance. Later, my co-worker informed me of the strange penniless man's history and unusual status at the coffeeshop. Everyone at LC is convinced that he is a Picasso waiting to be discovered. His artwork is purported to be incredible, though I have yet to see it. I wonder why they don't display his artwork at the very cafe where he is fervently revered, the one place where he is actually appreciated. Fame may be something that LC's Penniless Picasso will find six feet under.

One of my customers today was a former classmate at Penn, though he was more of an acquaintance, a friend of a friend.

"So, what are you doing here?" he asked.

"What am I doing here? Serving coffee, smiling at customers."

On the surface, this is exactly what I am doing at La Colombe. But in my mind's eye, I see farther and deeper, where the landscape is bigger and more spacious and crosses oceans and unknown territory. I am here, but I am elsewhere. Ooh, I kind of understand our Penniless Picasso now, that look in his eyes.

Tolstoy on War

2010-07-11T02:11:00.001-04:00

"Onthe 12th of June, the forces of Western Europe crossed the frontier,and the war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reasonand all human nature." ~Tolstoy, War & Peace

Is it strange that I found humor in this statement?

At first glance, it is an anti-war statement. At second glance, not so at all, for when are human reason and nature ever the sole dictators of a decision to be made?

And oh, Natasha! The innocent and pure has been blighted. I guess it was inevitable.

I find myself liking Pierre more and more as the book carries on. A strange thing about this book: In real life, I have a general tendency to like a person when I first meet them and then slowly find out their faults and like them a little or a lot less...or even more despite their faults. In War & Peace, however, I began with a general dislike for most, if not all, of the characters, but by the halfway point (page 687), I find that I love most of them. Minus the scoundrels (stupid, stupid Anatole Kuragin).

Something I've Always Wondered

2010-07-07T07:29:00.001-04:00

The difference between barista and barrister:

barista: Emphasis on the second syllable; comes from the Italian word for "bartender" and means a person that serves espresso-based coffee drinks; does not require an advanced degree.

barrister: Emphasis on the first syllable; comes from Middle English and in the US, is a less commonly used word for "lawyer"; requires an advanced degree...or you can self-study and pass the bar if you're a genius.

In the UK and Canada, however, the profession of legal adviser and advocate remain split, and so the former is called the solicitor (the one who prepares for trial, and takes legal action on behalf of the client), while the other is called the barrister (the one who speaks at the trial, or in fancier language, "pleads at the bar in the high courts"); the barrister is more of a specialist and is called upon to work on a case by the solicitor.