Illiterati

The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about.
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, to God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately — the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms blandly filled with excrement and meat? To what purpose? This was why they started in here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions why and to what grow real beaks and claws. It was kind in a way.

-Hal Incandenza

In college, a failing 5 is the only thing that made me feel stupid. Intelligent students I either sneered at from a distance or thought nothing of. Mostly, I thought nothing of them. I hadn’t felt a tinge of envy or worry that these ‘outstanding students’ will one day make me feel so left out and stupid. If only I hadn’t said those things about that coffee shop, maybe I wouldn’t have had to feel marginalized by the cum laudes I am now surrounded with, and maybe I would have stuck in there sa kapihan and not feel like a lemming in the company of the smartypants. At least in there, I never felt out of place in the company of people who can tell a Guatemalan coffee from a Sumatra. Lately, I’m slightly affected by career advancements, promotions, and work things I never expected I’d get occasionally sad about.

I don’t blame my school for this but I wish I could! I read a lot in college, insisted even, because I thought and I still do now that reading is so fine. Don’t worry because it doesn’t end with a  realization that Everything Worked Out After All although I may have said something like that to someone, or written that somewhere. I read and read but not much that had to do with commerce. The shame!

When you become part of the workforce, you willfully submit yourself to heartache and ego ache because intelligent people, who get hired by companies all the time, can make you feel really bad by virtue of their intelligence, competence, wit, and condescension. You’ll realize how awful it is to be made to feel stupid and inferior when you finally get the job that you  know you have to stick with forever. And there are a bunch of them, the intelligentsia. Not just from your school but also seemingly from outer space. Resent them all you want but they’re here to stay. All that rage is going to have to be spent somewhere because smart people are smart, they can get away with being less than pleasing human beings and they’re very much aware that you’re their inferior so when they bring up the topic of your inferiority, you either overcompensate or you fuck you them by any means possible. But since you have a lifestyle to maintain, you mostly ingratiate yourself to them and you cry yourself to sleep some nights and put on a beaming face the next day, ad infinitum. This is of course not the general state of the world, thankfully. I’m sure there are places where the average thinker, the idiot and the select group of contemptuous intelligent types harmoniously co-exist.

This is not hard core lamentation about life and the corny future. I just feel like I suddenly developed an understanding for people who feel the need to proclaim really obvious observations such as it’s hard being stupid, it’s nice to have ambition, or any of the self-motivational tripe people tell themselves about overcoming and enduring hardships.  I blame my education for this! That I feel the urgency to wander in the Internet space like this, talking sometimes about books and propagating resentment over random things, some of which truly deserve the hate anyway. Sometimes I suspect that the only reason why I hang on to this almost compulsive need to read is so I could have something. Maybe it’s something stupid but it’s still something. I don’t ‘review’ books. It’s just my something. Incidentally, I think about the kind of future where someone who got to be successful has been drained of all energy and interest to read. A life that allows no time to read sounds  horrible. It’s nice that I might never have to worry about that.

Please laugh

I had coffee at French Baker where the coffee is called Tchibo and on the way home I was laughing uncontrollably which reminded me of the time my ex treated me to a shabu-shabu dinner which cost over a thousand pesos, and I didn’t pay because I was a barista (it didn’t pay much), and he gave me a Girbaud wallet and a ride home because it was our 2^nd monthsary which is a faggy, faggy thing to celebrate but I knew I had to at least show gratitude but almost didn’t because, as I’ve told him, My Emotions Are Misplaced. They are just not where I’m supposed to find them when they are seriously called for. A shabu-shabu dinner and a Girbaud wallet should have meant tears because we’re homos and I, charity case and material boy should have cried buckets because he, my precious telecoms executive ex had plenty to spend but none, no waterworks, not even from just one eye. Coming home from SM Bicutan, I knew I was having again a Misplaced Emotion because my laugh was almost uncontainable and I had to remind myself of the time I failed ROTC because I went to an interview for the Varsitarian instead of going to the ROTC field trip. I failed the interview and ROTC and I got sad. That incident is my valium. I think of that and any unexplainable laugh at any given day goes away. Anyway, those misplaced emotions. I was laughing because I remembered something I’ve read in David Sedaris’ If You Are Engulfed in Flames. In his new book, David encounters an old couple that is so profane they’re almost fake. Every other sentence is accentuated, suffixed with shit, fuck, goddamn and ass. I don’t get why I’m so amused with profanity but I’m very entertained with literature that has no qualms about using such words because really, when has niceness been amusing? Actually, what else is amusing? In the book, he encountered this couple at an airplane who sincerely believed that everything served them is shit. An in-flight dinner is called “garbage” by the wife and the husband emphasizes the garbageness of the meal by saying that the meal is indeed a box of absolute fucking shit. That shit is funny. And also true because it’s non-fiction. David Sedaris is truly fucking funny. When You are Engulfed in Flames didn’t have me laughing in stitches as much as Barrell Fever had but it’s no less funny. David Sedaris must have said everything there is to be said about being a growing/aging gay man. He and Augusten Burroughs, damn them, those cocksucking assholes. Just this afternoon I had very lousy coffee from McDo which I really should have seen coming since McDo is truly the godfather of food service lousiness, and what I immediately thought was that This Coffee Is Absolute Fucking Shit when I sipped that 45 peso garbage. Then I remembered the David Sedaris characters who referred to the food they were served at the airplane as garbage. Then shit, then absolute fucking shit. I can’t get enough of profanity. Tchibo was just too expensive so I thought of McDo as the next best thing which is just a wrong thing to think. French Baker is okay but hair seems to be one of their secret, not supposed to be seen ingredient. And it’s true, the McDo coffee is just foul and if I have had tasted urine before, I probably would have proclaimed urine to be the superior beverage but I haven’t so the McDo coffee will have to retain that designation. This is the kind of incident that enrages me so often, when expensive as shit coffee isn’t as good as they’re advertised. And fuck you if think that this is my karma for being such an unfriendly barista back then. I may not have been too chummy with the coffee clients but I NEVER made coffee that resembled urine in flavor. I could never be that unfair. I could not have pulled a stunt that funny. I say fuck a lot but I’m not funny but i try my damndest.

Barista Diary

I’ve been in and out of jobs, hopped from one Ayala Avenue building to another, rode many elevators, and judged and smelled the people who got in the elevators. And corporate offices just can’t give me the kind of satisfaction that working in a coffee shop can. Being a barista has got to be one of the most interesting and slightly satisfying jobs I’ve had, and I’ve had quite a few. Plus it’s fun to say ‘I make coffee for a living’.

I’ve quit previous jobs for purely arbitrary reasons and having the benefit of a college diploma, I felt that seeking employment is not something that I should be worried about. I was under the brash impression that if I’m unable to find one, one will most likely find me. But I was smacked with the realization that having a diploma can and will eventually seem worthless compared to having an absolute and bankable talent because let’s face it, nobody cares that you had a nicely presented feasibility study while in college. While I haven’t been exactly a cocky employee, I had the gall to literally walk out of a high-paying job without so much as a goodbye to the manager or the obligatory passing of a resignation letter. I took off and actively decided to work as a barista. Experiencing a bit of desperation to find work, being a sweaty barista didn’t seem so bad.

It was a breath of fresh air to my collective working experience, having come from previously boring and unfulfilling jobs. And I believe that a person who had the nerve to walk out of a job lawfully earns the right to brand a particular job boring or unfulfilling as long as he’s able to at least express satisfaction to another. Otherwise, he’s just a slacker. I occasionally felt that I may have been coerced into becoming a barista since I felt that no decent employer would want to hire someone who permanently decides to get out of his cubicle as he pleases. But more than anything, I’d like to think of this unjustly branded coercion as a blessing in disguise. It was by no means an easy job but it was satisfying in a way that no other job on earth is. Being one of the most popular and most public of places, my coffee shop doubled as a place of work and a place to meet friends and dates. And even as it was implicitly stated by the management that flirting while working is punishable, there’d be baristas who’d feel duty-bound to turn on their charm and flirt like hell. It just seemed inevitable that as a barista I’d be serving more than just expensive, high calorie coffee. Looking back, I think I did serve some of my customers more than just coffee and that’s mostly because I didn’t feel like ruining tradition.

But being a barista requires more than just earnest smiles and proper I’m-a–college-graduate-too-although-I’m-serving-people-coffee diction. The hours are long and most of the time, it seemed long. Eventually, I felt that standing for almost straight 8 hours, manning cash registers and being asked to bus tables in perfect 10-minute intervals didn’t seem worth the supposed fun. It’s not that I’m too proud to clean after people, it’s just that in those moments of serious table busing, I was realizing that picking a career path that felt dubious at its conception is soon going to take its toll. And if I had known better, I would have exited sooner than I did, than be made to exit not entirely by choice but precisely because I have been terribly expressive about my growing dissatisfaction with what I’m doing. The novelty of saying, ‘I make coffee for a living’ has just worn off, and I couldn’t totally blame coffee for that surge of expression. People who run coffee shops are the height of perky so they notice things.

I returned to another Ayala Avenue office and since the cold in the office is nipple-numbing, coffee has become the perfect necessity and I have the perfect excuse to occasionally return to coffee shops and act annoyingly gushy, and it’s ok because coffee shops provide the ultimate platform for people who are distractingly effusive. But I don’t feel like being at coffee shops all of the time and there’s no way that I’d choose to work again as a barista (not that anyone would beg me to return), not having completely recovered from my semi-antagonistic departure. I know that the incessant job-hopping and the more than acceptable amount of caffeine intake has to stop but if things get shaky with my current employer, it is never too late to resort to certain acts of desperation which, if coupled with the right amount of perkiness, just might land me one of the most exciting jobs ever.

Shh.

There should be a coffee place that’s so secluded that it’s almost unheard of. A coffee shop that looks like it would go out of business because no one’s around. I could live with maybe 2 or 3 customers who preferrably should have laptops and who are just quietly surfing the net and not making any racket. Kids are ok, but they should be very, very preoccupied with their stuff. They shouldn’t be with other kids and be making noise. Otherwise, they’d be gunned down. People who’d speak on the phone should definitely be shot. Especially if their conversation is heard in the whole place. And if the conversation is about a multi-million peso business deal, they should be kicked out. Unless their conversation is for only about 5 minutes. That’ll be okay.

Coupe Coffee Station has the littlest number of customers today. I bet they have lesser on other days. Maybe, it being 2 pm on a Saturday is the reason for the lack of people. This place is situated in a gas station (Petron) and there ought to be hordes of neighborhood kids in here but that’s not the case, so, perfect. This is exactly the kind of place that looks like its owner had a very nice image of it upon conception but which eventually and sorrily turned out to be such a dud. The coffee is good, but people never go to coffee shops for the coffee so I don’t act surprised that there’s hardly anyone around. But maybe I am miscalculating the success of the place. I’ve only been here twice and that definitely doesn’t make me a qualified judge. I shouldn’t even be judging the place because it’s almost lovable. The baristas, who are all in the backroom when I entered (and understandably so seeing as there was only 2 people in), are remarkably quiet and unobtrusive. They maintain as little interaction with everyone as much as they could. I may not have been here long enough to conclude that they’re going to be as quiet as I’d like them to be but so far, they don’t seem like baristas you would want to strangle. And my fellow peace-loving customers are as quiet as the dead.

The quiet is amazing. Never before had the buzzing of an airconditioning unit sounded so peaceful and… magical. For a gas station coffee shop, the place is surprisingly peaceful. But then someone will soon come in and order something ice-blended which would create a terrible noise. You can only hope that these people wouldn’t come in droves. If somebody could just convince them that frappuccinos, delicious as they are, are going to make them unattractively fat, maybe you could get the quiet you long for longer than you deserve. But that’s probably too much to ask for this season.

Coffee Scoffers

Coffee drinkers in general have a tendency to say shit about the coffee shops they’ve been to. They go about preaching to friends about how the coffee they’ve tasted wasn’t good. Or if a person’s extra mean, he would even go so far as to say that the place that served the awful coffee is run by money-hungry corporate hippos who are out to rob him of his hard-earned cash (who is obviously misplaced because someone who pisses at coffee shops have no business buying classy coffee) and still manage to stay at the much-loathed coffee shop. I’m not partial against people who have things to say about these places because I haven’t been so kind myself but there’s got to be something else to direct one’s anger to.

When a person says Seattle’s Best coffee is too expensive, it’s because the coffee being served is far better than the coffee-flavored water served in other places and probably because the people who make the coffee are cute, which to some is not good enough reason (but it is if you ask me). People think they’re being witty when they go to these places and pronounce at broadcast level, ‘Ang mahal ng kape niyo.’ or if someone’s feeling a bit generous with the insults, would say something like, ‘Presyo ng kape niyo pwede nang pang-gas.’ Of course these people are Filipinos. I never once heard a foreigner complain about his coffee being so expensive and it’s not just because foreigners are not as cash-strapped as we are. It’s because an average foreigner would have the sense not to go somewhere he can’t afford. So maybe there really are coffee shops that are unjustifiably expensive but you could always ruin its reputation. Just create a blog and you’re all set. It’s that easy.

It’s just like going to a five star hotel to say, ‘Your rooms are so expensive!’ where if the receptionist is not in a particularly good mood, she could (or, she should) retort by saying ‘You could always go to Sogo.’ It’s similar for when someone goes to Fully Booked and say, ‘Your books are overpriced!’ where a similarly distressed cashier is likely to say, ‘There’s a Book Sale at basement 2 where books are cheap, meaning, they’re for you.’ It’s not that Sogo or Book Sale are not good enough but a person would have to be really ignorant to complain at these places because we have alternatives such as Sogo and Book Sale which are great. There are no conference rooms at ‘hotels’ like Sogo and the arrangement of books at Book Sale is non-existent. But I mean, we have options.

But what the hell am I doing defending coffee shops’s honor. It’s not like being associated with a coffee shop did me any good. It actually did, but it’s corny to get into.