Today I Appreciate My Coworker, With Whom I Stole Paper Cups For Tea

At my job, we have a coffee maker, a water heater, and tea bags, but alas, there are no cups. This lack of cups deems all of the aforementioned items completely useless, which is sad. Very sad.

I worked at the same place last year as a writing tutor and it seemed as though our snack bar was significantly more loaded up with cookies, crackers, chips, and other snacking items. Oh, and cups.

So, my coworker, Laila, and I decided it was about darned time we got some cups! With both of us working three hour shifts tonight, we decided caffeine would be an asset to actually, you know, helping us help students write.

Alas, grocery stores are not within easy walking distance from the tutoring center as we work up near the residence halls on campus. However, there's a quick-service cafe ("BruinCafe" otherwise known as "B Caf" to those cool enough to shorten it) right near the dorms that hosts a plethora of paper cups. Surely they'd be willing to give up a couple for the cause of tea?

In a break between sessions, Laila and I make our way down to B Caf (yes, I'm one of those cool enough people to abbreviate BruinCafe as such) and head straight towards the coffee section of the cafe because we figured, you know, coffee cups would be best for hot drinks. Laila bravely asks one of the baristas (is B Caf fancy enough to have baristas? A debatable point for later) for one of the cups, and...

"No. Sorry."

Laila and I look at each other.

"You can't just give us a cup for - um - water?" Laila asks.

The worker, strapped into an unfortuante apron and visor uniform shook her head again.

"No." That was it. Note that we were the only ones in the cafe at this point, staring at the stack of coffee cups waiting, just waiting, for delicious tea to fill them. No one was exactly clamboring for coffee at 6:30 PM, anyway.

We would not let this bureacracy-tied barista stop us from fulfilling our caffeinated dreams, however. Upon exiting, we saw stacks of paper Pepsi cups beside an unattended cash register. We look at each other again and nod. Perfect. Without saying a word, we follow out of B Caf and each swipe one cup from the top of the stack. Empty paper cups in hand, we giggle all the way back to the tutoring center about our stealthy accomplishment. True, we only stole about 5 cents' (if not less) worth of glass - er - plasticware from UCLA, but it still felt like a secret mission and accomplishment in which we could revel and savor the sweet taste of clever victory.

This post is not to endorse stealing, of course. In fact, stealing is bad. However, there's something that inherently bonds people together when they share a secret mission or goal together, even if it's for something as silly as some cups to make some tea.

The only sad part about this story is that the water heater at our tutoring center doesn't work. So, after all of that adventure, we found ourselves still tea-less in the end. However, the adventure was half the fun, anyway, and the conversation with all of the tutor-less coworkers kept us awake enough that the time at work flew by without any yawns or sleepiness.

Today I Appreciate the Self-Righteous, Eclectic Coffee Shop

Eek, I've missed two days of posting! It's been a crazy, busy week first week of school, but I took some notes on the past few days, so this will be an extra-special THR (look how an acronym enhances the cool factor of this blog) post with a few days' worth of appreciations in one.

Let me also preface this post by thanking everyone for thoughtful comments on the first few posts. The encouragement really helps keep me going, so thank you. :)

So, today, I felt a little claustrophobic in Westwood and decided to get coffee in Santa Monica. This tends to happen on Friday afternoons when I have no other class obligations or meetings or work. Keeping Fridays free is one of the greatest things I've ever done for myself; I can work all day on Saturday and Sunday if I'd like, but there's something psychologically pleasant and rewarding about having a FREE (read: "I-get-to-do-whatever-I-want-so-there") Friday. This is not to say I keep my Fridays homework-less necessarily, but I get to do it at my own pace and as a student, where obligations run one's life, that's probably the most marvelous feeling in the world.

Because of the nature of the column I write for "The Daily Bruin" (unofficially called "Exploring L.A.," offically called nothing), I tend to read NFT (Not For Tourists) and Losanjealous pretty regularly and discovered in NFT a coffee shop in East Santa Monica that makes coffee from a siphon.

What's a siphon? It's this: a tube running from the liquid in a vessel to a lower level outside the vessel so that atmospheric pressure forces the liquid through the tube (definition from wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn). Yes, coffee comes out of those liquid pressure tube things. Neat, huh?

Hence, I undertook a question to find this siphon coffee place after class, toting a heavy backpack and directions scrawled on to a tiny notepad. Let me say that I have a terrible, terrible sense of direction, so I wrote down very specific instructions (including, "if you hit this street, you've gone the wrong way. If you hit THIS street, you're going the right way! Hooray!").

Walking off the bus past Wilshire Boulevard, I walked through a neighborhood of palm-tree lined streets and low-rise pastel-colored apartments with small balconies and little, square garages right near the street. It was the sort of charming West L.A. neighborhood that helps you realize that in spite of all of L.A.'s general lack of charming, refreshing pockets of humanity and character exist. It really elevates one's spirits to know that there are people living in peaceful alcoves of a city that inherently cannot be described as "peaceful."

Cafe Balcony is part of a strip mall and the sign outside merely reads "CAFE" in giant block lettering. It could just have easily read "BAIL BONDS" or "LIQUOR" as it was an inconspicuous strip mall shop facing loud, urban Santa Monica Boulevard. Yet upon stepping inside, the place engendered all of the warmth, character, and soul that the outside lacked. I was the first one in the shop (as I had arrived there on bus an hour before it opened, so I just read outside for an hour. Woops.) and I ordered an iced Americano and sat for two hours, doing homework, reading, and writing. The cafe's red walls, mismatched wooden chairs, and wacky music selection (ranging from electro-pop to alternative folk rock to smooth jazz to - get this - opera) felt like a cozy place to settle in for the day.

With each breath I took, the smell of coffee warmed me all the way through my body. Sitting there is what I imagine going to a cafe in Paris would be like (as cliche as that sounds): no one rushes you, everyone is reading their own great books and simply enjoying time to reflect, focus, and rejuvenate. I appreciate coffee shops that don't rush you out, that don't tell you when to leave, and don't encourage you to act "artsy" if you don't want to. There are a lot of pretentions around sitting in a coffee shop and "being an artist," but when it comes down to it, when you have a place like Cafe Balcony that is simply pleasant and encourages time to just sit and reflect and be, that's enough for me to not worry about what anyone else may think of me. That must ultimately be the most freeing experience and I appreciate it after a week of feeling like I had to live up to academic/social expectations.

As far as my other past few days go, I'm simply going to state what I appreciated: Wednesday I appreciated my USIE classmates (that is, other students teaching undergraduate seminars at UCLA in the spring like me) and Thursday I appreciated dancing with my co-workers to Depeche Mode (what a freeing experience that was, too!).

What a peaceful, lovely day thus far.