all the world's a stage

...and all the men and women merely players:

two days ago, an elderly woman, dressed head-to-toe in emerald-city green (egad!), bursts onto the scene barking at one of the customers for leaving her puppy outside (for two and a half minutes) to die a gruelling -- *cough* fictional -- death in the sweltering heat. after shouting fatty! at the dog owner (the entire coffee shop gasps), Esmeralda is dismissed from the premises by one of the baristas. (imagine a very angry vaudeville hook.) and the crowd goes wild!

taking centre stage yesterday: three new Gen Zeds -- one guy, two girls. he's a mute wallflower and blends in well with the current conversational wasteland. but the girls -- one PippiLongstocking-meets-SideshowBob; one SinéadO'Connor-circa-nothingcompares2u -- are in a perpetual state of wigging out. it's loud-speaker voices, oversharing, and exclamation marks absolutely everywhere. a sampling... Redhead Zed: my mom was engaged seven times before she got married! Skinhead Zed: i'm trying to be seductive, but it's not working! Deadhead Zed: ...  (shhh, i think he's sleeping. zzz...) eventually, heckling from the peanut gallery (aka the forty-year-old ordering his mocha somethingsomething): HEL-LO!? but the Zeds are oblivious. and, since the show must go on, the audience learns that Red's dad was forty-two and had braces when she was born, and that...

today, it's a one-man show, starring my favourite character, Professor FLQ, who's popped by for a "brief" (it's never brief) chat. today's monologue revolves around the flying squirrel, the 1972 munich massacre (how had i not known about this? *crawls out from under rock*), his ride-along with the ottawa police, his love of country music, his aversion to all things internet. then, he offers to set me up with a sixty-five-year-old man. excuse me? upon recovering from the initial shock, i threaten to defriend him altogether if he does this. and to leave him sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. he promptly changes the subject.

and now back to translating...

star bucks: the next generation

this is how it always goes: you learn a new word (like "percipient"), and suddenly everyone's using it; you discover an actor you'd never heard of before (e.g. Jessica Chastain) and, out of nowhere, she's in every new release (and gets to kiss Brad Pitt); you hear some interesting new tidbit of trivia (it's a little-known fact that...) only to realize, shortly thereafter, that everyone already knew that and didn't you hear so-and-so saying that last week? and where have you been all this time?

yep: the world's conspiring against you. and you'll never know why it's choosing to do it in this particular (aka inconsequential) way.

anyway, it's according to this logic that, having witnessed the first arrival of Generation Z to the coffee shop only a week ago, i of course now hear a gaggle of barely-twenty-year-olds galumph into the café. the lead girl -- in sheer wide-eyed wonderment -- shouts out to her friends: hey, guys! it smells like coffee in here! wow. very percipient.

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...