Coffee House Reflections

You go to Coffee House to socialize and listen to your musically-inclined friends and their bands play their songs. You get coffee. Or ice water, if you've already had your caffeine allowance for the day--I have. You watch people, laughing, smiling, nestled in tie-dyed beanbags on the floor carpeted in plaid, green plaid that looks like a clan tartan. You listen to excited voices, a roar that competes with the music. You smell the coffee, the hot cocoa you're holding for a friend who's clapping to a Johnny Cash song. You pull out your journal to make some notes, if you're an anti-social intellectual like me, but you forget your homework, the assignments that hang over your head for tomorrow--the reading in Aeschylus and Austen, the presentation that's incomplete but will have to do because you've spent an inordinate amount of time on it already, the creative writing exercises that you didn't do in time for class today, the ones due on Friday. You hope the meteorologists' prediction for eight inches of snow is right, imagining the glories of a class-free Friday when you can get caught up on your life.