25 May 2001

For those of you who did not dream that high school classmates had grown up to be Rastafarian librarians: no gloating, it's not nice.

(For those of you who went to RHS, the classmate in question was Tony Lenhoff. Just to make it worse. Good old Toner. I wonder what he's up to these days....)

Well, yesterday we discovered coffee, of a sort. I had seen two coffee places in downtown Hayward on Friday, and it became time to check them out. Timprov and I drove down there and ended up trying both of them, because the Patisserie had the worst coffee I have ever had. Ever. This includes church basement coffee. This includes church basement coffee made by the guy at my folks' church who keeps wanting to be helpful and cannot do anything without screwing it up. Bad coffee. Bad bad bad. They seemed to do okay with Timprov's 7-Up. This is not a recommendation.

I threw away my bad coffee. I am too old to have to drink bad coffee. When my mom turned 40, lo, these many years ago, she decided that she was too old to have to eat the crusts on her bread. Or anything else she didn't want. I decided to press my luck (what are teenagers for?) and proclaimed that I, too, was too old to have to eat the crusts on her bread. Or anything else I didn't want. Mom said okay and kept pulling the crusts off her bread.

So I don't eat stuff that's nasty just because I bought it (although I like crusty bread). If I pay for the world's worst cup of coffee, does it become less a waste of my money if I have to drink the whole thing? It does not. So. Timprov and I walked down to the other coffee place, The Bistro. They have drinkable coffee. And they stay open. And they have live music pretty much every night, which could be good or it could be terrible. But it's a tolerable afternoon workplace.

They have a sandwich on their menu called "Too Hip For Hayward." Now, I will be the third or fourth to tell you, I'm a geek. I'm happy being a geek. So maybe I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of hipness. But I could not spot anything on that sandwich that made it hip at all. The closest thing was sun-dried tomato spread.

Sun-dried tomatoes are not too hip for Ralston, Nebraska. And somehow, I feel like Ralston should have been my nadir for hip cities to live in. (If we ever move to Edina, you can mock me forever on this one.) I've lived in a city where the coffeehouse thought that "live entertainment" means "the barrista does South Park imitations for friends." So I really think that anywhere I live should be more hip than that. But if sun-dried tomatoes are too hip for Hayward....

Maybe it wasn't the tomatoes. Maybe it was something I'm not hip enough to know about. Maybe turkey is now really hip, and I'm just too geeky to know. All the cool kids are eating turkey.

I really don't think that's it. How depressing.

It's my grandma's birthday today. Grandma is neither too old nor too hip. She's just right.