3/7/2022 - Stone Creek Coffee
Class for me doesn’t start until 2:00PM today. I am sitting at Stone Creek on 5th Street in Milwaukee. It is 9:25AM, I got here about 2 hours ago to work for a bit.
A long wooden table with 6 chairs was open and I chose a chair at the end of the table. My laptop is open in front of me along with my work computer to my right, a notebook, coffee, water bottle and other miscellaneous things scattered around me.
A man with blonde hair down to this shoulders came to the end of the table and asked if he could sit to work on a homework assignment. I type this now as he is sitting diagonally, 2 chairs away from me to my right. I’d assume he’s about 30 years old. My AirPods are in and I have Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head album playing as I hear him start talking to me. I pause my music to ask him to repeat himself. He says, “This assignment is hard.”
I asked him what he’s studying and he tells me that he is studying marketing at UWM. The man, who I later find out is named Teddy, proceeds into a long conversation about the communications industry now in 2022 after I tell him that I plan to go into the field.
He mentions that interpersonal communication is failing in friendships, professional relationships, and even families. Technology is trumping over verbal communication efforts. I sat and listened and could not have agreed more with the words that he was casting on me.
Teddy asks me what the Marquette professors with PhD.’s say about communication, specifically when it comes to being present in the moment, and face-to-face interactions that seem to be more and more rare as the years advance. I talked about that for far too long.
True interactions are becoming lost: The raw meeting of people to learn about one another and enjoy the physical and spiritual being. I oftentimes find myself there. I find myself in times of preferring a text message over a FaceTime, and FaceTime over an in-person meet up. I do not write to condemn the people that prefer to converse through a screen, because I myself prefer those ways far too often for my liking. Talking with Teddy, a man who was once a stranger, in the coffee shop about the failure of real human connection was an ironic scenario, but one that I needed to experience.
I sip on my coffee — a dirty chai, really — and tell him with a half-embarrassed laugh that I find the most confidence to talk to people after a cup of coffee. What should have been said was that caffeine gives me the confidence to talk more, and to people I maybe wouldn’t typically. Like Teddy here in Stone Creek.
Teddy tells me about reliance on it for the last 8 years. He said his New Years Resolution was to cut the caffeine and quit coffee. I have never heard of anybody wanting to “quit coffee” before. The idea sounds good in my ears as I look to his cup and see nothing but a clear cup of water.
I laugh to myself and tell him that that sounds like a great plan; I press play on A Rush of Blood to the Head and I began to type.