Schedule Change

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"

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

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

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

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, spent, 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!"

End of the School Year

Caffeine is magical. 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 Natasha 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

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

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

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

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

-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

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

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.