coffee shop memoirs

6:30
So i'm at this coffee shop called Sweetwaters (I know. It screams "see, see! we are unique! we are not starbucks! but basically they are starbucks. Anyways) and there is this really loud group of ladies having a knitting circle in the corner, but i like them. I prefer to come to the coffee shops early cuz when you come later it's the stressed study crowd and there are lots of people and they are all undergrads and instead of studying they talk and it's like...COME ON PEOPLE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STOP TALKING ABOUT DOING WORK AND DO IT ALREADY! But the 5 to 8ish crowd are the hardcore studiers who want to be in bed by 10. The point of all this though was to say that this place, Sweetwaters, has a fireplace with a tv showing "log burning fire" inside of it and this really FOBy asian girl with like colored hair and everything (very harajuku baby love) walks up to this fireplace and crawls up on the ledge and starts like trying to figure out how it works. and me and this asian girl next to me are like, hello silly harajuku, it's a tv! so sad.

Ok wait. I'm an ass. I just tried looking close up at the fireplace and it's NOT a tv. And the other asian girl next to me is also kind of staring at it. Now feel kind of bad for mocking that FOB girl. I love FOBs. Wow this fireplace is rather intricate. It has real wood in it but then it has like a projector somewhere projecting the scene of a fire on the brick. Me and the Asian girl keep staring at it but we are too embarrassed to go up and be like the FOB and crawl onto the ledge to figure out how it works cuz if we were judging her than others will judge us. We are having a moment. I feel you, young asian girl. And we both have IBM computers! what if she is like my asian soul sister, my kindred spirit, the diana berry to my anne shirley!

7:35
on hour later, what have i done. let's see, i had a really deep discussion with orges and emily about Heroes and the butterfly effect and the Ray Bradbury story "A sound of thunder" (if you watch heroes wiki this shit!). i'm not feeling my reading right now. this couple across from me is practicising what appears to be that clicking african language. what's it called???? !click! is that what it's called? anyways what's funny is that they are the whitest peole i have ever seen and here they are having a !click! convo.

i'm reading this article that is basically debunking all kinds of feminist dominance theory stuff and saying that women's voices are suppressed in adolescence but so are mens. this is one of my favorite lines of any psych paper ever i think

reviving ophelia is certainly a worthy goal. however, Hamlet also displaysed serious problems of indecision and lack of voice.

9:40.
it's startig to snow again. I kind of love snow. It's so....magical. that just made me think of gilmore girls and lorelie and how she loves snow. but seriously it's so pretty! it's like everything i've ever eeeeeemagined and nothing i've ever eeeemagined. It's the bomb. I kind of hope it's cold enough to stay on the ground cuz i really want to wear my new snow boots tomorrow. I think if i lived in a city where it snowed and i had to look cute and wear heals ahd drive places i'd hate it. but i live in a small town and i can walk everywhere in my really ugly utilitarian clothing from REI. quote me later during a blizzard, but i kind of love winter in small town america!

it reminds me of when i was younger and my mom had this collection of mini christmas towns.
It's really wierd to describe to people who have never seen it but there are different villages like an alpine village, the north pole stuff like that. My mom collected the "christmas in the city" collection which was basically new york in winter (not that my mom and i had ever seen new york or winter for that matter) and the "snow village" collection which was essentially a small white surburb and "dicken's village" which took place in the village where "a christmas carol" took place. I used to be obsessed with the dickens story I think mainly because of these damn villages and because my mom raised me watching that old version of "a christmas carol" with albert finny. Seriously my mom is the reason why i am a gay man trapped in the body of a straight woman. eeemagine being raised on musicals and making fake christmas villages! that kid from Ugly Betty would have died in my house. Sadly my mom has stopped celebrating christmas cuz she says it's not fun anymore but man we used to go all out! My mom's changed alot. But anyways in addition to having these humongous village sets all over the house we also had a giant nativity set. Flashbacks, we even used to make my dad cut out giant peices of wood so we could have a "stage" to set the village on and we'd use bricks cuz my mom said it "created depth to have houses on different levels" and we would start going to the christmas collectors store months before hand to get ideas and we'd meticulously plan our villages. god my mom was so crazy and yet i see so much of myself in her. this all kind of explains a lot....sorry i'm having a moment. I shoudl unearth the collection. I bet it's worth a lot since most of the peices have been discontinued or retired.

aaaanyways every christmas until puberty we would put up our villages and we would buy fake dead trees and fake snow and sprinkle it on top of fake rocks and make a fake river out of celaphane (spelling?) paper for the fake porcelain kids to skate on and it was like the highlight of my year making these stupid villages. Winter here feels like a mixture of "christmas in the city" and "snow village." because when the snow falls on the rocks it really does look like it did when i dropped the fake snow on rocks in "snow village" and the streets really are kind of made of brick and cobblestone like in "dicken's village" and ice gets stuck in the cracks. and everyone has hats and scarves that flow in the wind and snow topped roofs and dead trees with tiny bits of white snow on them. So I will be honest, we californians really don't know what we're missing.