Cafe Crawl #1

Everyone under the radiant southern cross has surely heard of the "Pub Crawl". But has anyone ever considered going on a "Cafe Crawl" instead?

Let's be honest -  We live in a society that is equally as bent on caffeine consmption as it is on alcohol consumption, so the Cafe Crawl seems like it should be a natural progression. Surely crawling from Cafe to Cafe, in some kind of caffeine-induced delerium, would be just as thrilling, if not more thrilling, than drunkenly rambling from pub to pub? Surely the gentle and quirky ambiance of each cafe would prove far superior to blaring pub rock from varying decades?

On Saturday morning, I decided it was time to embark on the first ever Cafe Crawl in recorded history. I embarked on the journey alone, armed with a fierce nay blue coat, some cash, a bit of wit and a notepad.

The following is a journal I kept of the experience:

9:52AM - Black Bear Cafe

I'm sitting at the most cramped table at the most bohemian cafe in Bellingen, a town which itself is both cramped and bohemian. I just began the fabled "Cafe Crawl" alone, but alone is really the way I like it. I've recently come to terms with being the biggest and most brooding introvert in history, and I don't see my intense solitude as a bad thing.

I've learnt that a lot of joy comes from spending time alone, with yourself, exploring the world around you through your eyes only. Solititude brings a lot more joy, fulfillment and clarity than being stuck with the wrong company. That's something I learnt the hard way.

Everyone in this cafe seems to be deeply connected, whether it's through friendship, familiarity of frequent intercourse, I don't know.The staff are bursting with life, and their warmth is rivalling that of my capuccino.

I suppose I should actually write about the coffee itself. It's perfect and I don't think I can fault - except the cup it was served in is possibly the smallest cup in existence. The richness of the coffee and the skill with which it was clearly crafted far outweighs my disappointment and it's petite stature. I've been drinking it at a medium pace, taking infrequent sips of water. Though I would love to down this beauty instantly, I have decided it is worth savoruing.

I watch as a gregarious woman booms her coffee order from across the Cafe, very politely yet also with a hint of aggression. I suppose the two combine to show how passionate she is about Coffee. I like this woman.

11:15AM - Tuckshop Bellingen

I never realised that two neighbouring cafes could feel drastically different. The smallest o features, like lighting, music, and design can somehow make mountains of difference in terms of ambiance.

I have a theory that going out for coffee isn't just about the coffee. It's about the ambiance, about how you feel going to that cafe. It's about the coffee experience.

Cafe workers, including myself, have two balance two key ingredients, in my opinion, to make it work. Making it all work takes 1 part good coffee and 1 part good atmosphere. Even the best cup of coffee just want taste as good if I don't feel comfortable sitting down drinking it. Having said that, no amount of flirting with patrons can change the way a bad cup of coffee tastes.

Looking around this cafe, I feel like in a showroom. There's nothing wrong with it, but it just feels a little intimidating. Every surface is sparkling and every wall is pristine white, but there are just no features that catch my eye. There's nothing to stimulate me, or to make me feel comfortable. I feel like this chair doesn't want to be sitting on it. It's arms are cold and unwelcoming, and everything feels dangerously chic.

Although I feel a little out of place here, I can't deny how much I am enjoying this vegetarian sourdough. It's difficult to find vegetarian food, when dining out, that is both edible and substantial. But this roll has hit the spot, quite a few times. Though my capuccino was a tad bitter and served without chocolate, and I find the ambiance a little intimidating, all can be forgiven thanks to the sourdough.

12:36PM - Bean Cafe Bellingen

I'm now up to Coffee number three. I had to yell over the top of a - very passionate - live jazz band to order my coffee, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

As the jazz intensifies, I can feel myself entering into a caffeine-induced delerium. Three coffees is probably a bit much, but I'm on a cafe crawl, and I will drink this third coffee if it's the last thing I do.

I don't exactly feel like all my troubles have fallen away, but instead, I feel the jazz music and I are moving so quickly that the troubles can't keep up. I feel a bit like Chicago's answer to Amelie, but maybe that's just the delerium setting in.

Though I'm at least fifty kilometres away from home, I've still managed to run into two people I went to school with, someone I work with, his mother, and a stallholder who apparently knows me. I visited the local produce markets between coffees today, and the man who sold me potatoes and bananas swore he'd seen me before. After we established that, no, I wasn't in a band, so, no, he hadn't seen me performing, we came to the assumption that we must have met while drunk. We chatted briefly on awkward points of life, before I wandered off, still having no recollection of ever before meeting this guy.

The gentleman across from me was eyeing me off consistently, but I only noticed as he was leaving. He drank a milkshake of unknown flavour, while the woman he sat with had some form of tea. I suppose it would be rather odd to ask the waiting staff what the table had ordered, but I'm just so curious. Perhaps it's all the caffeine making me this way. Perhaps it's finally having some time off. Perhaps it's the live jazz.

I guess the mystery will prove more exciting than knowing anyway.

As I discard my take-away cup and wander, reluctantly, away from the live jazz band, I ponder on what I've done. I have just finished the first Cafe Crawl in recorded history, and dread to think how many shots of coffee I've injested in the process.

As the music fades, I wonder whether I've really made history or if I'm just an idiot. As my heart beats faster and louder than ever before, I decide that both are probably true.

I don't want a boyfriend I just want a life

Last night I saw a lot of people I hadn't seen in a very long time, and met a few new people. It was the eighteenth birthday of old friend of mine who left town earlier this year to go to uni.

I looked around at the sea of faces. Smiling faces. And then a comment was made about how "It's so amazing how everyone has a boyfriend now". I looked around again at all my friends, boyfriends hanging off each of them. Everyone looked so happy, and as though no matter how shit things were or would become, they had someone else to share it all with; someone to fall back on; or someone to cry to.

I downed Moscato with force and couldn't help but think I'd somehow pulled the short straw. My friends had either moved away to start uni or stayed in town to finish school - and despite their student-induced-poverty and constant greivances about having to study, they were all happy. 

The birthday girl's mother asked me how my love life was going. I didn't snap, and I didn't snap anyone's necks. I answered truthfully, "Nothing's really happenning". She began gathering pity, so I continued. "I was with someone at the end of last year, but he was a bit manic, so I decided I'd rather be alone. I'm so busy and I work so much I hardly notice".

The last part of my response was partly true. I was with someone, and I did call it off. But he wasn't manic, he was just wrong for me, and I'm too stubborn to make things work out with someone I don't even like much. And while I am busy and always working, it doesn't mean I don't notice there's no one there. 

I keep finding myself in tears whenever I'm physically alone somewhere. I'm unhappy. I thought stepping straight out of school and into a full-time job would be worth it. But the truth is, no amount of money is worth more than my happiness. I earn a pittance, work horrific hours, and have nothing to show for it.

It's not that I want a boyfriend. It's just that I want to have a life to live, and something or someone to call my own. I don't want to be the "workaholic" who "can't come". I want too be the life of the party - like I used to be. I want to be brimming with energy and creativity, ideas and things to say.

I feel like I've pulled the short straw and nobody else seems to care. I'm losing my friends and even myself, for minimum wage. Sometimes, you have to back out of something. You have to walk away and close a door. 

I'm at a turning point right now where it'll either get worse or it'll get better. And if it gets worse, I'll quit my job and leave. There's no shame in doing what you have to to look after yourself.

Be kind to yourself.

Big Picture Shit

It's nearly St. Patricks Day, and my room and life are still a mess. I moved in at Christmas, and figured I would have got everything sorted by now.

At the end of last year, I practically walked out my final exam and into a full-time job. I thought the transition from student to full-time worker would be easy. I had five days off at Christmas, and of course, being my usual ridiculously-driven-to-succeed self, I decided it would be a good idea to move into my brother's house over those five days.

We all spent Christmas Day at my brothers house, sitting around the table and getting profoundly drunk on our chosen drinks. If I remember correctly I think I was slightly late to the family lunch because I was madly packing my belongings at my old house to bring over with me. Christmas Eve was the last night I ever slept at the house I had called home through senior high school, and Christmas Day was probably the last time I wasn't "busy" or "working", and one of the last times I've actually spent quality time with my mother.

The five days I thought would last forever disappeared in a heartbeat, as did my mother and her caravan. Suddenly I was working all the time, and saying "I can't" to everyone and everything, all the while watching my mother disappear with her husband and caravan into the distance.

I made a lot of unspoken promises to myself and I don't know that I've kept any of them. I kept vowing that I would take the time to properly move in to my new house and new life; to organise my things and my life, to unpack every box and to really settle into whatever this chapter of my life would be. I foolishly said that I wouldn't let things change, that work wouldn't get in the way of maintaining friendships, and that I would still do the things I'd always done.

Some things are difficult to understand until they are actually lived. My parents always told me that after high school, everything and everyone sort of fell away, and moved away, and that everything changes. I laughed at them, thinking yeah well maybe that happens to some people but not us.

Yeah well It happenned to us.

I think the worst thing is not that my friends are all slowly but surely moving away, changing, or drifting away from my newly workaholic self. The worst thing about this chapter of my life is not that things are changing, but that I feel like I am changing, in ways that I don't want to change. The mask I put on for work seems difficult to take off, and I seem to be pushing everyone and everything else away from me as a standard reflex. I think I've always been a fairly independent person, but now it just feels like I'm stubborn. I nearly got into a relationship at the end of last year, but then ran. I was terrified of being with someone, of opening up to them, if there was a chance that it wasn't right, or that it could end.

I don't know how or when it happenned, but my need to succeed has suddenly sky-rocketed, and driven me to avoid failure like bad coffee. I don't seem to start things - relationships, new friendships, hobbies, random little projects - as much any more if I can see them coming to a probable end.

I guess the great thing about changing is that it happens constantly... so I can always change again? I have this weird motivational phrase I like to tell everyone that has quite the opposite effect, that "you can do pretty much anything, it's just hard". I guess that applies to changing. I have this crazy dream of living and working in Europe in the near future, but it's not really crazy at all. I just need to tough it out through four years of uni and become qualified*, deal with working on the side and sacrificing things so that I can save money for my dream. It's not an impossible dream to fulfill, and it's not just plausible either. It's very possible, it'll just be hard.

I know they say the best things in life are free, but some pretty damn good things require hard work, study, and sacrifice. I will make it to Europe, and maybe (and quite probably) stay longer than I intend. There are just certain things I have to do to get there. Anything's possible, it's just hard. Hard but rewarding.

*I'm planning to study French and Linguistics/Sociology (undecided) at university next year

And then everyone left, and I got a job

It has been a fucking long time since I last posted on here. I guess I'd better quickly fill in whoever's unfortunate enough to be reading this on what's been happenning.


November: Well, the HSC finally came to a profoundly anti-climactic end when I finished my last ever high school exam. It had been Society and Culture, I believe. We drove off into the bush immediately afterwards for our much cheaper, earthier version of the notorious schoolies.

Our version of schoolies didn't go for very long. It actually just consisted of camping by a river, drinking, smoking, and swimming. At one point we all journeyed across the river, away from our campsite, for a bit of a wildly unnecessary bush bramble. We left one of the girls behind at the campsite because she was asleep and is one of those people that you just don't wake up. The interesting thing was that this particular friend of ours was terrified of lizards, and exceptionally large goannas had been circling our campsite for most of the morning. We figured leaving a girl who was terrified of lizards alone with a bunch of large lizards was a perfectly dandy idea, because, you know, she was asleep. For some reason, none of us took into account the wild notion that people often wake up after they've been sleeping for a while.

We all eventually returned to the campsite, slightly sun burnt and incredibly exhausted, to find that our friend had mysteriously vanished. We gazed up the hill and discovered that she had not, in fact, completely disappeared. Rather, she had merely teleported herself into her car, a place where she would be physically protected from the goannas that, upon waking up, she had discovered were circlcing the tent.

Somehow, we all convinced the goannas that the three of us were remarkably fearsome and, as such, they should vacate the premisis. Getting our friend to leave her car and return to the campsite - now completely but probably only temporarily devoid of goannas - was a much more difficult task. 

After two nights of camping, I returned home. In the same day, I attended a job interview for a job I would later recieve and officially signed out of high school. Straight out of the exam hall and into the work force. For the next week or so I entertained an old and dear friend who was in the process of moving from Dubbo to Cairns, and decided to visit in the mean time. When we weren't drinking, being emotional, catching up or wandering the streets in a thoroughly existential search for meaning/something to do, I was attending training sessions for the job I would soon begin.

Suddenly, I found myself bidding farewell to my friend at the local airport, crying, next to another crying friend. Before I knew it I had started the job, which was to be a strange cross between Barrista, Till Person, Waiter, and Wholesale Delivery Boy. But for the first month, all I did was help move the entire business from one venue to another. That was quite the induction.

December: My workplace officially opened, and I was introduced to two new friends I would be seeing a lot of in the future; "Overtime" and "Wages".

Christmas came and we all sat out the back of my brother's house. I managed to move my entire life from one house to another in five days. There were gifts and deep conversations about things that happenned before I was born with people I never knew. There was beer, and wine, and pavlova. I managed to move my entire life from one house to another in five days.

The new year came in while I was on the toilet. The Dixie Chicks Greatest Hits played in the background as I heard Lola and her boyfriend shriek about the New Year. I rushed out, washed my hands, and changed the music to "Midnight Radio" - a glorious song from off-broadway musical "Hedwig & The Angry Inch" that I'd always wanted to play at midnight. We drank wine and peppermint tea, played scrabble and nibbled on chocolate before spooning in my double bed.

January: My new years resolution was really just to be healthy. But somehow January ended up as a month of alcoholism, parties, take-away and not sleeping enough. I went to work, saw my friends, got drunk and that was about it.

I was (of course) working when my mum and her husband left town in their caravan to travel around the country. I came home and suddenly realised that I now had to do my own washing and cooking.

Two of my closest friends turned eighteen in January. Both are from New Zealand and neither seemed very fussed about their coming of age. I owe one of them a pub crawl.

February: I'm not sure if anything remarkable happenned in February. I worked, a lot, but decided to start looking after myself at home. I re-entered the kitchen I had evacuated when the HSC hit, and learnt when to add red wine and what works in a quiche. The answers were "always" and "everything".

I ventured to Sydney in late February to celebrate a friend's 18th/go out clubbing/get out of the fucking small town I hadn't left since October. I took myself to Arq and then Bondi, where I snuck into the backpackers and intended to stay until sunrise. It became very freezing very quickly, and so at 5 in the morning I gave up, picked myself up off the grass and caught a bus back to where I was staying.

I spent a lot of that weekend on busses. I snuck a bottle of wine into the East Hills Hotel, caught up with a friend I hadn't seen since school ended at Coogee, and had a few drinks, Thai Food, and a go at the Pokies with my mum at Beverly Hills.

I sat at the airport terminal for two hours until my plane finally arrived at 7am on a Monday morning. I read Frankie for an hour, then we were there. I got off, went home, showered, ironed my uniform and headed to work.

And that about sums things up. I'm no longer a student, or a child. Working to pay my own way, rent and bills is thrilling and terrifying. At the moment I'm a bit under the weather, and for the first time, am really missing mummy.