The other day, after my oral exam on Martin Scorsece's movies, I went to Kiva Han to get a tea and sit alone for a bit. I wasn't feeling somber or bad for myself at all, I just had time to kill before a gallery opening and didn't feel like going home. Although, now that I think of it, I was a bit more hormonal than usual which could probably accout for my viewing the followins scene so emotionally.
I sat alone at a two person table; an awkward one in the middle of the room surrounded mostly by four person tables and groups of three huddled over papers. There were two other solitary men at lonely tables, forming a triangle with me. I made the mistake (or maybe had the good luck) of choosing my seating hastily and therefor breaking some cardinal cafe rules. I sat awkwardly facing both of these two lonely men; staring at them over the empty tabletops, they couldn't help but do the same thing back. Every motion I made got their attention, distracting them from reading or writing a paper. I recalled my highschool video teacher Eudald telling me in his heavy Spanich accent, that people only spend time in coffee shops so they can be distracted and to look at other people. As a sixteen year old girl, that statement greatly affected my self-righteous, coffee shop loving sensibilities and I will never forget it. As I thought about those words that first shook my conceptions about being cool and trying to be cool, I was distracted.
Two girls sat down kitty-cornered at one of the four person window tables, about three feet from me one had her back to me and the other was facing her and me. Upon first inspection, they were that indeterminable age range from 14 or 15 to 20; basically high school or early college. That range, which I still fit into is probably the hardest time period to be a girl. Looking at them obectively, they had developed fully into their hips and boobs, yet were still sort of limby and didn't quite seem fully comfortable in their bodies. They were also wearing clothes that, it seems are destined to remain forever popular among the alterna-girl, skater-boy-crushing, "un-popular" girls; clothes that definitely suited me in my first year of highschool, long before I realized the sheer stupidity of it all, and truly tuned out. I imediatley sympathized with these girls, I felt as though I knew them intimatley, and was not threatened by them the way I would have been by a "cool" girl my age.
These two girls had met up at Kiva Han, located between two college campus', across the street from a starbucks, and often the breeding ground for missed connections and casual first dates. Going to art high school in New Haven, my Kiva Han was the dimly lit, always bustling Koffee?. The girls were at Kiva Han for the purpose of studying for the SATs,
