What Appears to Be

"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

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

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.