When it comes to making friends with baristas, I’m like a bad boyfriend: secretly needy, bad at communicating, unsure of what I want and just kind of weird.
Maria worked in a cafe that occupied the same old, ornate hotel building as my apartment. She’d ask how my day was going, make my order as soon as I walked in and let me linger while I hogged the Wi-Fi for longer than I could get away with stateside. A homely waitress in her 30s with bleached blond hair, she invited me to hang out with her kids and told me if I ever came back to Argentina, her door was open. In short, she helped me live out a fantasy: I was starting to become a regular.
One morning, I found myself heading to the cafe directly across the street from Maria’s where another waitress worked. She was cold, grumpy and judgmental — I’m pretty sure she rolled her eyes at me once while I stuttered over my order in broken Spanish. The only time I ever saw her smile was shortly before my flight home when I told her I was leaving. Maybe she was proud I finally put a sentence together. Or maybe she was, as I feared, happy to see me go.
In 1982, sociologists Ray Oldenburg and Dennis Brissett found that cafes were stimulated bastions of unpredictability where we, free from the constraints of our home and work lives, could venture to interact for interaction’s sake, to socialize with complete strangers — to practice being human.
These days, I am apparently really bad at doing all of those things. Finding a spot at Maria’s — a corner of the real world I could claim as my own for just a few hours — was all I thought I wanted. But as I realized Maria was getting used to seeing me show up before class in the mornings, I started to feel self-conscious about whether I would be able to live up to my dream. What if I didn’t want “the usual” anymore? Would I hurt her feelings if I chose to sleep in or if I was too busy to swing by for a few days? I didn’t want to ruin her expectations, so I made sure Maria never had any and fled to less friendly turf across the street.
Looking back, it’s stupid to think I was important enough to disrupt someone’s day by straying from my own routine, but I actually spend a lot of time thinking about baristas and my own neuroses. As I sit in Unicorn Cafe, I debate the ideal amount of an eye contact between when I greet a barista and when I glance up at the menu. Too much could be creepy, but too little might shut down a perfectly good conversation. I rehearse what I order while I wait in line at Peet’s in hopes of not accidentally pulling a Starbucks and embarrassingly ordering a Grande or a Tall. I freeze up and mumble inaudibly when a barista asks me a question I’m not prepared for, like what type of milk I want or what my name is, so I started telling them my name was Noah because nobody ever asks me to repeat or spell that. Now I’m sure some of them actually think my name is Noah.
My world isn’t the same cafe Oldenburg and Brissett examined, however. Sure, coffee shops are an escape. And sure, they’re stimulating environments — stimulating in the sense that I like to get so caffeinated my hands shake slightly while I hammer out cover letters. But a social experience? Not really. I tend to sit with headphones on and eyes glued to a laptop among like-minded zoned-out individuals. For a few minutes every visit, though, I get to live up to Oldenberg and Brissett and talk to someone who isn’t a friend or a professor or somebody I know. I get to talk with the stranger who makes my mocha just to celebrate the fact that I can.
Recognizing the importance of those interactions doesn’t explain why I overthink them. From Norbucks’ tables, I look on with jealousy as other students form instant friendships at the counter, but I’m sure their brains don’t run through the same marathon of thoughts that run through mine. An old professor once told me the worst thing you could wish on another man was self-awareness. The truth is, when it comes to my pursuit of barista love, I’m not sure I like what I see. I worry the best indicator of my ability to be a functioning member of society is now whether I can get through my order without stumbling or being accidentally antisocial. I cringe when I remember that for weeks I told baristas my name was something else to blow through the act of ordering. I wonder what it says about me that I used to walk three extra blocks around my apartment to avoid getting too close to a barista I wanted so badly to befriend. If who I am in the real world is who I am in line at a cafe, then I’m just no good at practicing being human.