Evenscry’s Weblog

I am in a strange mood today.
Last Sunday I went into the bookstore cafe and wrote about absolutely nothing for hours. I visited with a couple of friends, drank a lot of coffee, and had a generally good time.
I think that I would have liked to have spent this Sunday the exact same way, but one cannot spend too much recreational time at one’s job.

See, last night my shift ended at 8 o’clock.
I was ravenous, and I had no plans, so I decided to sit in the cafe and perhaps do some writing or read a book. Instead, I ended up holding two separate two-hour conversations.
One was with my friend Click, a regular customer that I’ve now known for years. He and I talk almost all the time, it seems, though we don’t get to talk in-depth for more than five and ten minutes.
It was good to sit and talk with him over his usual cup of tea and my chocolate chip cookie and milk. (Yes, you heard me right. I said that I was hungry.)

We discussed the most random things.
Our discussions often go from whatever works we’re reading right now to how people perceive the world from their respective heights (I’m rather short; Click is rather tall), to the strange things that other customers do. Sometimes, Click even asks me if I spit in people’s drinks when I work in the cafe. (I definitely do not.)

Last night, Click and I ended up discussing how we each have considered creating pieces of art that have to do with the customers we find, the little society that we meet, in the cafes where we spend our time. Click is a photographer with a background in film, and he used to work on his projects at a cafe other than my own. He got the idea back then, simply by seeing the different “regular” customers that did the same things that he did. We have a similar group of routine attendees at my cafe.

I personally have thought of writing some sort of collection of short stories that take place in a cafe such as my own. I have met so many different people over the years with interesting stories. Many of them are kind, some of them are just looking for someone friendly to talk to, and a number of them are just plain odd.
I’m just not really sure how to get the weft and weave of this tapestry I would like to create, you know?
I can’t write it from reality, and I have to find a new context in which to place these people. And I have to tweak the stories. Taking from real life can be rather dangerous when writing, I think.
If nothing else, it leaves you open to law suits, I believe.

Eventually, Click had to get a little work done before the bookstore closed. I had every intention of leaving when I espied one of my other customers sitting in the corner by the door. He was poking on the internet on his laptop.

I don’t know a whole lot about this particular customer. He is handsome, blue-eyed, and French. Though his accent is certainly alluring, it adds to a certain cockiness that he has. I don’t know what to make of him, and I have never been able to figure out whether or not I like him.
In the end, I spoke with him for an hour. I suppose that I know a little more about him now.
I always knew that he was in engineering, that he was a math whiz, and that he lived in town. I didn’t know his name, and always thought of him by his drink name (Green-Tea Frappucino, Venti. No deviation.). So, Green Tea was someone who I always wanted to talk to more; I just didn’t know if I would much like him.

The conversation kind of went in an odd direction, at first, with Green Tea asking me why I quit teaching so suddenly.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you…” he started that query.
How peculiar.
Why bother even wondering about your bookstore barista, eh?
Probably just being polite.

Obviously, I’m trying to figure out this situation, and indeed, there is likely not a situation.

I need to find a new man upon whom to fixate, and should probably just work more on my fiction writing instead. Green Tea and I would be a bad match. We’re rather different from one another, and it’s likely that he is not single.
(They’re never single, and I’m incredibly tired of that.)

At least talking with a new man is helping me get over that inappropriate crush of mine. I’ve got it mostly under control, particularly in comparison to how I was doing with it the last time I wrote about it, but every time I talk to him or even am in his vicinity, I feel some sort of pull somewhere near my solar plexus.
(Then I get embarrassed about it because I’m sure that it’s obvious and I feel such a fool having a strong attraction to someone so happily taken.)

But I do think that that all will get better, Green Tea or no Green Tea.

Either way, I think that I’m going to go try to get some more fiction down on the screen, and wish that spring were coming just a little more quickly.