I spent a lot of time on the north side of campus last semester, and what that meant was that I spent a lot of time at the restaurants located there.
There was one cafe in particular that I was especially fond of and frequented most. I loved the way the sun filled it with warm golden light in the morning, the way its sweetest coffee drink tasted with an extra spoonful of brown sugar on top and the way I always seemed to get more work done seated near one of its windows than anywhere else. But much more than that, the thing I most loved about this place was that one of the baristas who worked there always remembered me and could predict my drink order before I’d placed it.
Walking into that cafe felt, and still feels, like belonging to a world where everyone is connected. It feels as if even the neutral places in life contain the opportunity for connection if you just reach out for it, as if everyone is just waiting to be familiar, like maybe the Gilmore Girls Stars Hollow ideal isn’t too far from a reality you can have.
That’s a far cry from the way Berkeley usually feels. Berkeley as a college campus is large and made up of a diversity of perspectives so great, it can feel utterly anonymous, simultaneously like there must be a place for you in all those perspectives and like the sheer number of places makes it utterly overwhelming to find the right one.
As a student, the city of Berkeley can feel even harder to parse. It’s a city of activists, of the very rich and the very poor, the overeducated and the underserved, still consumed by the ripples of an era that made it famous now roughly five decades past. In a town with so much history, what role should and can students, with their two-to-seven-year expiration date, really play? And what is it exactly about warm pools that residents here seem to love so much anyway?
And that’s what makes the barista dream so sweet. It’s a simple notion: This place isn’t so large, it says, and you have a place here if only because this is where you often are. It’s a common one, too — so common it feels a little trite to talk about how you’re a “regular” at an establishment.
But I don’t think that the sense of belonging that comes with being recognized is necessarily a genuine one, exactly. When the barista remembers your drink, it doesn’t really mean she has a particular investment in your life. It might just mean you come in a lot, or that it’s nicer for the barista to feel like there is something recurrent in her job than not. Or that this exchange isn’t all about selling coffee, but that it’s also about helping someone deal with a tired day or assuaging someone’s sweet tooth — it means something to someone beyond the cut and dry exchange of capital for product.
And I guess that’s what I think is going on here: We are looking for something beyond the events as they happen, a significance born out of some larger system.
In his unfinished novel The Pale King, late and legendary author David Foster Wallace wrote the following:
“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.”
In a September video blog, vlogger and young adult author John Green attributes people’s obsessive need to check their cellphones to avoiding a “deeper” pain by distracting ourselves out of real engagement.
“Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time I check my phone, it’s not because I’m so busy I can’t do it later,” Green says. “It’s because, on some level or another, I fear feeling that deeper type of omnipresent type of pain that Wallace was writing about.”
While I definitely think that’s true, I think there’s something more going on here, too. I think the reason we check our phones all the time has a lot to do with the reason I love my “regular” cafe.
We want to feel like there is always something important happening. We want to feel like people are trying to contact us — like there’s a greater system of which we are an intricate and important part, like we are an integral part of our barista’s day, like there is larger purpose to our actions, to our lives.
In my mind, Wallace’s “deeper type of pain” isn’t a fear of engagement so much as a fear of nothingness itself, of meaninglessness. Because if we aren’t an important part of the system of this city or this campus or this coffee shop, then why are we here at all?
Contact Sarah Burns at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter: @_SBurns.