where is the love?

a good friend regularly reminds me that it's good to make changes now and then. like switching up your morning routine: maybe starting with the other leg when you put your pants on. or taking a new route to work: say, going through -- instead of around -- the experimental farm. and, indeed, you find you pay closer attention to your habits (sleeping on this side of the bed feels so weird...) and surroundings (whoa, nelly! has that house on island park drive always been yellow?).

so, over the past week or so, for good measure, i've been introducing some small-scale changes: plugging lane swims and modern dance (back) into the weekly schedule; periodically drinking black tea or lemonade, instead of only hot chocolate; and, now, testing out a new coffee shop.

what's great about this spot -- located smack dab in the heart of downtown ottawa, among the bustle (well, it's really more of a drone) of nine-to-fiving public servants -- is the music: a string of omaha and wanna be startin' somethin' and brandy alexander. with every loop back to august and everything after -- aka my grade-eleven soundtrack -- i feel increasingly in the groove (which, incidentally, is no small miracle lately).

and yet something significant is missing. the staff manages the cash transaction just fine, and their delivery of the goods is in check. but their howareyoutodays are completely vacant. what?! where is the love? perhaps it's been sucked from their very souls, by virtue of the hours they've spent having bureaucrats bark eleven-adjectives-long orders at them (gimme a no-whip, extra-foam, super-skinny, soy XYZ with a double shot of ABC, lots of DEF, and, um, do you have something that will remove the wrinkles from my left knee? 'cause i'll take three shots of that) while carrying on with their fellow chatty-cathy suits.

there's no doubt about it. the love i'm looking for is right where i left it: at the other end of this long street, back home at my usual neighbourhood coffee shop. where they have extra whip cream and all the wrinkles a left knee warrants. and where the faces of baristas, regulars and newbies alike are not just very familiar; they're friendly and funny and frank.

so my friend's right (as he usually is). these changes are good. in this case, not because i necessarily expect to warm up to this new place. (some things are just too hard. and i'm not ready yet.) but because it makes me realize how spoiled i've been back home. and, what can i say: that's a good feeling.

and now back to translating...

ch-ch-changes

settling back into the neighbourhood coffee shop, after being on the road for a couple of weeks (woo-hoo!) and sick in bed for a couple of days (doh!), reminds me that lots can change in a short period of time. oh, sure, some things stay the same: this no-whip hot chocolate still rocks (even in 35˚C heat), and Tumbleweed -- currently sporting the disturbingly popular white knee-high + brown sandal ensemble -- is still kicking around. but some other familiar things are noticeably different.

take the art on the back wall, for instance. whether featuring close-ups of peeved cockatoos or watercolours of trees on distant hillsides (*cue the violin*), the rotating artwork is consistently pretty. that's "pretty," as pronounced by a five-year-old girl who worships pink (the colour, not the "artist"). by contrast, this week's works are a series of distorted, abstract images. on the upside, perhaps they suggest that this clientèle isn't as mainstream as i'd thought! on the downside, nobody should quit their day job: this stuff's "pretty" ugly.

next: get a load of these Regulars! shouldn't they, by definition, remain unchanged? instead, they're over there behaving irregularly. for one, there are three of them here right now. (i've hardly seen even two in the coffee shop at the same time before. and, ps, would it have killed them to invite Professor FLQ and me to their little convention?) but far more notable is that each member of today's all-male cast has the same yellow short-sleeved golf shirt on. atypical, to be sure. plus, it's giving me painful flashbacks to a very bad date (not unlike an evening with the Snore Sisters...though with fewer opportunities to escape) with a guy whose own yellow golf shirt basically summed up his personality. (eek!) luckily, the shock of this "what not to wear" episode is tempered, albeit only slightly, by the fact that yellow is my favourite colour. (phew!)

finally, there is a definite shift in demographics: three mini-muscled, american eagle, swaggering twenty-year-olds have just descended upon the table next to me. ta-da! it's the coffee shop début of generation z! and -- oh, goodie! -- it's a double feature: a few minutes later, two of their female peers bounce in and over to the same spot. but the scene that follows proves more perplexing than entertaining:

Girl 1 giggles over to Boy 1, clearly signalling that they're "together" in some way. (Girl 2 looks on, mostly silent, occasionally giggling, and just a tad jealous...like any good sidekick.) B1's response -- some slapdash kiss -- indicates more or less the same togetherness. however, he's focused more on not looking like some kind of a "wuss" in front of his (awkward, chuckling) friends than on being sweet with G1. within moments, B1 and G1 have made vague plans to talk later on, and the Giggle Girls depart. as soon as the duo are out of sight, the trio morph into a 21st-century skater version of the wannabe boys from Madmen (aka Pete Campbell & co.): they begin roaring with laughter and, with broad smirks still in tow, rolling their eyes at G1 and taunting Pete.

as it turns out, Pete is totally uninterested in Giggles. as it also turns out, he can't let her in on this bit of information. why's he so tongue-tied? well, he's just in short supply of two round objects that would normally be found dangling loosely from his nether regions. ah, yes. unfortunately, current dating experiences of women of all ages keep pointing to a recurring phenomenon: that, regardless of the girl, many "grown" men are just as "mad" as young Pete. these are the cute/sweet/bright/down-to-earth/original thirty-one -- or forty-one or fifty-nine or seventy-six -- year-old guys who've spent three and a half weeks dating a woman, have initiated plans with her for two months down the road, and have then left for a work weekend in victoria, never to be heard from again. she's disappointed when it doesn't work out, i suppose. (though losing Mr. "Original" can hardly be considered a big deal.) but no notice? no short-and-sweet straight-talk? *sigh*

i guess, hot chocolate and Tumbleweed aren't the only things that endure the test of time, after all.

and now back to translating...