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Message |
| Posted By: |
Don't know Jack |
| Date: |
20-Feb-2000 |
| Subject: |
The Cafe At The End Of The Universe |
I hang out in cafes a lot. You can learn a lot there. For example, this morning, I realized that there's a kind of "breaking in period" you go through any time you discover a new cafe. You stumble upon a cool place and stop for a cappuccino and have a good time. Afterwards, you realize that the reason you liked the place was that you had cooler thoughts there than you do in other places. So you find yourself drawn back, over and over and over. In time you discover that you've become a regular. But for a while, still trying to be cool and inaccesible and deny the fact that the place has you fimrly by the gnarblies, you keep to yourself.
You know the drill...you sit in a corner and push out the I-vant-to-be-alone this-is-not-the-occultist-you're-looking-for vibe and read a book while checking out the scene. During the checking-it-out period, you occasionally meet people and have conversations with them, but they're not the deepest conversations in the world. You laugh and joke around, but everybody keeps it pretty near the surface.
And then one day you look around and realize that you *like* these people. You check out the faces and start to really see them. And you realize that you've got a lot in common. You all come here and sit in this cafe and drink cappuccino and rap instead of going to the infinite number of other places you could be going. You think of all those other places, contrast them in your mind with the feeling of at-home-ness you find here, and you smile and start to relax. And like magic the level of conversation shifts and you find yourself in a very different cafe, having very real conversations with people you are proud to call your friends.
I've seen, and lived, this phenomenon many times in many cafes, and still don't know whether the cool conversations were always going on round me and I didn't notice, or whether the whole cafe underwent some kind of mystical paradigm shift and the conversations really *did* get deeper and more interesting. It's a mystery. And I don't know about you, but I've noticed a similar shift here in this cybercafe lately. I really like it.
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