This is what i do at Starbucks...

I love to sit at Starbucks, pretending to read a book when I’m actually observing the people around me (sunglasses work nicely for this), or eavesdropping on people’s conversations (headphones make a great decoy).


Today, I’m listening in on a roommate interview that I can’t actually hear very well and an exchange of a used Northface sleeping bag for $100 cash. A cute girl comes in and buys an iced tea, goes back to her car and puts the tea inside only to re-enter Starbucks. I think for sure she has spotted me, is intrigued by what I am reading and wants to introduce herself. Instead, she goes to the bathroom. I guess she got cold feet.


Then, there’s the couple sitting in the corner of the establishment, the girl sitting on the lap of the guy, swaying back and forth as they both stare silently at a computer screen. I can’t get behind them to see what’s on the screen. My curiosity burns inside me. Eventually, the girl finds her own chair and sits directly in front of the window, facing out, which is particularly awkward for me since I’ve moved outside and am sitting directly in front of her on the other side of the window. Occasionally, I turn and glance at her, and it feels as if I’m at the zoo.


A well polished, black Mercedes pulls in and a middle aged woman wearing oversized sunglasses and a brown sweater emerges. As she walks inside she is untucking the t-shirt under her sweater, and in so doing she pulls up her shirt high enough to reveal her stomach. It’s actually the third stomach I’ve seen today under similar circumstances. The first two were while I was eating a burrito at lunch.


An ambulance drives by, sirens wailing, as the woman whose stomach I saw returns to her car, gets inside with her drink, re-emerges with an empty coffee cup from her cup holder, throws it in the trashcan. Addict, I think. Doesn’t she have anything better to spend her money on? I take another sip of my $4 latte and continue reading.


I always try to imagine where the ambulance might be going. Someone, somewhere is having an emergency, and it seems a bit strange to me that so many people make a really good living off of other people’s emergencies. I’m thankful that I’m not having an emergency, though if I were I would be comforted knowing that my emergency was helping someone put dinner on the table, send his kids to college, save for retirement.


There’s a guy in a red car at the intersection rubbing his hands together as if he’s cold, but I know he’s not cold. It’s a warm afternoon, and he’s in a car where a lot of heat gets trapped. I wonder why he’s not at work, and then he yawns. He must be lazy, I think.


Another lady is walking in now, shuffling across the parking lot like she’s in a hurry, like she has some emergency of her own to tend to when she gets inside. I wonder if she drives an ambulance for a living and doesn’t know how to separate work from the rest of her life. Either that or she’s one of those egotistical and pretentious types who assumes that she has to move quickly through life because she has so much going on. She makes it inside and heads straight to the bathroom, and I feel badly for judging her.


My coffee is gone, and I begin my ritualistic post-coffee buyer’s remorse. Was it really worth $4? Could I have made this at home for half as much? Am I one of them? Then I remember that the coffee wasn’t the point, really. I just needed to get out of the apartment for a while, and that was worth $4. Besides, I obviously have gotten a lot done. I feel better.


The guy working the drive-thru comes outside now, right ahead of the lady who went to the bathroom (the fast one, not the one with cold feet). The drive-thru guy is picking up the wind-scattered newspaper left by the roommate interviewer. The sun is a little warm for me now, and the drive-thru guy is still attached to his headset as a black Mazda pulls into the drive-thru. He welcomes the driver with an annoyingly happy greeting through his headset, and I’m amazed at his ability to multi-task, picking up trash and delivering spot on customer service at the same time. The drive-thru guy is about 20 feet in front of me and the drive-thru is about 10 feet behind me, and I wonder why the drive-thru guy doesn’t just walk up to the car and give the headset a rest. I wonder if the person in the car can hear the drive-thru guy in stereo, both through the speaker directly beside her and through the air behind her. If so, she might look back and see him picking up trash and be just as impressed as I am.


Another lady enters for her coffee, and as she does the alarm on her car sets, the horn honks quickly to indicate “alarm on,” and I nearly jump out of my chair. It’s not like its quiet at this busy intersection, but the horn still jolts me a bit. The ambulance is back from the emergency, heading back to the fire station but still blasting sirens as if to remind people that he just came from a serious emergency. I wonder if I should flag him down and tell him about the lady who ran to the bathroom.


The lady with the alarm comes back out. When she de-activates her alarm the signal lights blink a few times, quietly. No horn. Why is it necessary for the “alarm on” signal to be so loud while the “alarm off” signal is so quiet? She gets into her car, re-emerges, like the sweater lady (but not like the cute girl) to throw away an old coffee cup. Yet another addict. Really, what’s wrong with us?
I secretly wish I had another cup of coffee.


A poodle- with orange, Halloween bows tied in its hair. This is too easy, I think. A lady in a Buick with a decorated poodle. She’s also wearing oversized sunglasses, and I wonder why its so important for ladies to protect their eyes as well as their temples from the sun. She’s feeding the poodle chocolate, of course, and I wonder if she’s lonely…and I know she is.


Because we all are…


The guy who needs a roommate. The guy buying the sleeping bag. The cute girl. The guy rubbing his hands together. The guy who makes his living tending to our emergencies. The lady with the stomach. The girl on the other side of the window. The lady who had to go to the bathroom. The guy sitting to the side, observing it all, praying to God that someone will be interested enough in his pathetic Starbucks stories to read it all.


We’re all lonely, to varying degrees anyway. Not alone necessarily, but lonely. Not all the time, but more often than we’d like to admit publicly. And that’s not a bad thing, just how it is, and it tends to feel so difficult for us. When we don’t know how to react to it, when we try to compensate for it with over-priced coffee, stylish sunglasses, extravagant poodles, clever stories. When we try to distract ourselves from it by imagining that the cute girl is here for me or that the average girl in the window is an attraction at the zoo or that the guy rubbing his hands is too lazy to work and somehow inferior to me. We long for connection with someone…anyone. We work hard to position ourselves advantageously in relation to others, to be noticed, to be liked, to be significant.



I’m walking back to my apartment from Starbucks. As I approach the entrance to the complex I click the remote clicker and the gates open ahead of me. I like to walk into my apartment parking lot like this. I like the feeling I get when the gates open and I walk through instead of drive through. It’s like I’m royalty, a king, entering into his palace, without a remote clicker, and the gates open because someone knows that I’m the king and that I’m coming and that I shouldn’t have to open the gates for myself.


As I get closer to my apartment I notice a “St. Edwards Alum” sticker on a car. I wonder if it’s St. Edwards University in Austin and get excited. I’ve been thinking about applying to grad school at St. Edwards in Austin, so I imagine meeting the girl (because, of course, it’s a girl) who owns the car and asking her if she graduated from St. Edwards and when she say’s “yes” I say “oh my god, can I trade lives with you?” and she laughs and she tells me that she has her masters in liberal arts from St. Edwards, and I act shocked as I tell her that’s exactly the degree I want, and we have a good first conversation, and two years later we go out for drinks and talk about our masters degrees in liberal arts from St. Edwards and how enlightened and lucky we are to have such a degree and how everyone else who has a degree in, say, business or math, or a job in finance or real estate, is so one dimensional and must be terribly bored and unsatisfied. When our waitress comes by and asks if we want another drink and we ask “is it still happy hour?” and she says “no” we politely decline because neither of us has a job and we’ve both already spent more money than we should have…


But, we don’t regret it…we were both lonely and we enjoyed one another’s company.