Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Getting my fix of coffee shop addiction

A café in Bordeaux, where I was hanging out last month
Latte in hand, basking on a café terrasse in the Nordic sun, striking a balance between watching and ignoring fellow coffee-drinkers I mused on why coffee tastes better on a terrasse in public to at home. A professional coffee machine is a recent addition to our household, yet still it's not a patch with hanging out in cafés.

A very tedious job I once held was endurable thanks to a completely authentic Italian-run café opposite where I would replenish all my reserves. Had the café ever shut down I would have quite simply have had to leave my job immediately and cite my reasons for doing so.

Years of being a student nurtured a full-blown coffee addiction. This has developed over the years to become, rather more specifically, a café addiction. It's the venues as much as the toxin that I need to get my fix of. I am, I confess, a coffee voyeur...or is it coffee exhibitionist?

There is, I feel, a sort of complicit sorority within those in a café. And a subtle one at that- too overt and it is ruined. Should a discrete half smile at another become a full-blown gurning contest then the people in white coats are not far off. Likewise, everyone half attends to others' conversations in cafés but very few interject. All this is the fine line between companionship and creating and atmosphere and trampling over others' toes. This delicate balance is seductive: tuning in and out of other's conversations and taking in the view, there exists a sort of solidarity built out of roasted coffee beans and half-baked dreams.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

For us feminists there's Pacgirl too

Does anyone else remember the ZX Spectrum? Bitter-sweet recollections have returned since I tried out a dinky little Pacman game online. I used to have an old cassette player into which I popped the games and waited several generations while it screeched and whirred away sounding oddly like a toaster racing around a wet Brands Hatch.

For us feminists, do you remember Pacgirl too (she had a pink bow I think, as all of us double XX chromosomers do)? Although the lack of identifiable gender traits makes it androgenous Pac I suppose, which is fine too. The older generation of games had vastly inferior graphics and simplistic game playing strategies (remember the relative thrill of discovering Mario could pop down those tunnel pipes to collect bonus coins?). Despite this, playability was still arguably comparable with now.

All this leads my graphics befuddled brain to one conclusion only- we must evolved to have the propensity, or even need, to operate avatars in virtual worlds and skip between platforms. This has been passed down since way back in the the Eve and Eve era. I wonder if there's a little section of our brains which one could dub the fantasy region: responsible for daydreams involving Angelina Joli, nocturnal phantasies (really that is how Freud spelt it, so it was more similar to phallic I can only suppose), and of course wildly imaginitive alcohol-induced self-images (I myself become John Travolta on the dancefloor after the third beer and up until the fourth). All of these virtual worlds come from the same part of our heads and render us susceptible to gaming, thereby explaining the otherwise unexplicable allure.



http://www.schulz.dk/pacman.html

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Pink perspective: left-leaning lesbian


As a liberal, left-leaning lesbian I see the world through glasses that have a definite pink hue to them. By this, do not infer that I am a Polyanna-like eternal optimist, far from it. A Libranesque reality-defying balancing act of cynicism and realism colours my vew of the world. That, and of course my innate tendency to see things with a gay slant at times: a bent perspective if you will.

In these anti-ethnocentric times, for me to be reduced to mere functions of my demography is, well, downright belittling in the literal sense of the world. But then, need that make it any less true? My argument is that the counterpart to this, the prevalent heterosexist view needs redressing somewhat.

Meaningful cultural references that resonate for me are those that have a sapphic spin to them. I spend a great deal of time seeking gay (specifically lesbian) culture- film, music, TV shows and soforth. When Alanis Morisette sang the lines, "meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife" in the aptly titled Ironic, I smiled a wry smile while a straight friend argued that my homocentric perspective led me to misinterpret the lyrics. (The famously bisexual singer has since confirmed the deliberate ambiguity of the line, releasing yours truly from the hook). Could this imply that it is my straighter brethren who cannot shift their stance to admit other possibilities- so acustomed are they to everything being hetero, or simply that people of course will see the world form where they are standing first, and other perspectives second.

So for now, I'll keep my pink-specs right where they are. This is no doubt due to my inherent inability to appreciate the opposite of the species in "that" way, and frank love of same-sex sex and love. While still no natural optimist, I wouldn't change my position for all the world.