8 posts tagged “coffee bean”
Outside my Coffee Bean this morning:
Environmentalist: Excuse me, Miss? Do you have a moment to talk about the environment?
Me: (keeps walking) Hells no! I don't even know him.
Cable and internet has been down in my hood all day which puts a serious cramp in my work situation. I'm writing from a Coffee Bean where I was forced to crouch in the corner for about 15 minutes. My bony ass was digging into the floor and I had this moment where I was thinking to myself "This is what turning into an adult has brought me to."
Desperately searching for invisible internet signals in the middle of a Los Angeles coffee shop, my fat-free ass acquainting itself with the cold hardness of a tiled floor. There are moments of adulthood that have made me re-experience childlike feelings of desperation and patheticness that I haven't felt since I actually was a helpless little girl. This is one of those moments.
Now I'm here in a wicker chair with my laptop keeping my legs warm. It's almost time to sign off and get ready to go to Harold night at UCB. I've waited all day for this last stretch of the work day, and now that it's here I am so relieved I could cry. Work was hard today. It was hard to keep going and make it seem like I didn't care. I wanted to throw a tantrum, stay in bed, do anything but keep trudging through my responsibilities like I do pretty loyally every. single. day. Sometimes you just want to throw in the towel and quit, but there's this little voice in the back of your head that's persistently saying "JUST KEEP GOING!" I realize that this is pretty childish complaining. Everyone has to work all day and there are certainly people who have it much worse than I do, but MAN am I tired today.
"They used to make this shampoo that had tequila in it and it was called Born Again. It was great, just really great stuff, but people at the church wouldn't buy it because of the name. I think that's just being too sensitive."
- A woman in a baby-pink blazer, sitting with her church group this morning at the Coffee Bean on Wilshire and Western
You know when you're super mondo busy and you have a ton of windows open on your desktop and you minimize your email to cross-reference something and at that moment someone decides to gchat you twenty times in a row and your computer makes that "CLUNK, CLUNK, CLUNK" gmail sound so loudly that it feels like a short, angry man with steel-tip boots is kicking you directly in the temple?
Perhaps it's the stress talking, but I believe that this is the sound I will hear right before I finally lose it and shoot up a Coffee Bean.
My Coffee Bean went from playing Paul Simon's Graceland on repeat to some Train album. I'm actually upset that I can identify the band who plays this horrible music.
Graceland has been my favorite album since I was two years old. My mom took me to see Simon on this album's tour. I can remember bopping on the shoulders of a family friend to the songs that had become familiar to me on rides to school and weekends in the sunny backyard. Each song stirs my soul and brings me back to a happier time in my life.
I can't say the same for Train. I just can't.
I'm in front of my office and a homeless man just passed by and raped me with his eyes.
The worst part? I was thinking he was kind of cute.
I've popped into a place called Cafe Audrey twice this week and while it's a little too far away from the K to call it my office, I've really started to enjoy the regulars and staff.
It's an Audrey Hepburn themed hole in the wall with customers ranging from Yuppie-ish 20 somethings to the local homeless dudes. The owner just lent one of the regular hobos a twenty dollar bill-- that's kinda something for Los Angeles, let me tell ya.
Yesterday I was here when I was throwing together my Britney video (my most popular so far! check it out!) and a homeless man gave me a show with his harmonica and then gave me a talking plastic figurine of Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. It's still in my computer bag and every time I bump it up against something I can hear him say "EXCUSE ME!"
It's not the Coffee Bean that I've come accustomed to (they know my name there now, it's sad), but it's something different in this city that seems all the same.
I totally look like I cut myself, huh?
