Starbucks-crossed cultures

Photo by Karen B. Hunter, August 2005.

For the past two nights, I have had someone get ahead of me in line. Before that, someone splashed a Passion Fruit tea --

400,000 people have been displaced in Lebanon and I'm about to describe a store full of twenty and thirty somethings who pause to find out what flavor of tea was splashed onto a homeless woman who wandered into the Starbucks at Union Square. Actually, I mean to prove that the two events are not so far apart. I do not pretend that I have experienced anything like the horror which is going on in Lebanon, or even the smaller one in Haifa.

But, this is the third night at which I have been at a Starbucks which served as a crossroads for tourists, somewhat gainfully employed Gen x-r's, y'ers, their children and the homeless. The Passion Fruit tea was lobbed at a junkie who crossed in front of a woman on the bathroom line. Tonight, another woman banged furiously on the door of the bathroom after I had just entered. She was clearly homeless. It struck me how the very hip, young Japanese tourist behind her seemed to just take things in stride. As if seeing the slow disintegration of American cities is described in Fodor's.

There was nothing in me which could turn the woman who was banging at the door away, however. She was just looking for a comfortable semblance of a place to be private. I was paying for that privilege and she was just taking it. Too much of my life is spent this way -- paying for time. I take cabs so that I can sleep a little longer, pay for expensive coffee so that I can sit with my computer and do work I could do at home without the distraction of bed and in a space which is kept visibly clean and in pace with trends I cannot really afford. My comfort has become a fashion statement, and the irony is that it is directly conflicting with the immediate needs of others, some just students who have years before they consider the relative value of the money they are spending, and others who use the frenetic distraction around them as a camouflage so that they can relieve themselves in private.

In my neighborhood, most of the people my age stay indoors when they are not working. They have cable and anything else which can be paid for monthly and delivered. For the lower middle class, our leisure time is spent almost without motion. I cannot blame those who succumb fully. It's going into the "city" which leaves me vulnerable to needing a place to sit and think -- to be enticed into spending what initially doesn't seem like a lot of money just to be "out". I can no longer afford plays -- the very purpose of a life in NYC. Yet, I have refused to accept my sentence to my apartment, my podcasts and my DSL. I read in the NY Times today that some Israeli's are having their bomb shelters wired for internet access. The author took that as a sign that they understood this would be a long conflict. And I imagine an entire world of people lucky enough to have shelter afraid to leave it, with the rest of the world wandering through Starbucks, and other temporary places of refuge, in continued conflict over bathroom lines.