Thoughts in a Peet's Coffeehouse

Everyone is alike: we all use language (sometimes timidly and sometimes obnoxiously) to feel out our existence, our relationship to our world and to others. We act, and measure the effects and meaning of those actions through language. What has the world said about what I do, and how has it made my actions meaningful?, we ask. Here I am, awake in the language debris that's washing through a coffeehouse. Washy, washy. A poet, almost thirty, a woman who is so cold, a man who calms a cold woman quietly as he hands her a steaming tea, and a tattooed coffee-man, offering commentary on the Shawshank Redemption, keeping up an airy banter with the other less-articulate coffee-man, whom I can't hear very well.