The Secret Society of Coffee-Grabbers
Posted on December 16, 2019
Thanks to my American Friend* I’ve realized that there is a secret society that I’ve not been aware of. A mysterious club of common Coffee-Grabbers which are – yes, you guessed, Illuminati, but besides that – a group of people that construct dreams without a colonized idea of laddered-education and who dare to ignore established phobias of hierarchy.
I know sequels are never as good as originals (except when your last name is Haraway and first Donna), so I don’t expect a lot of excitement when I say: let’s talk about coffee. I know, I know, I also thought that all of the mysteries were solved when I achieved my life goal by successfully ordering a lat-ay. That my investigation is finito, kaputt, załatwione**, but as we live in a layered, layered world, it turns out there was another invisible world of coffeesphene just under my capitalistic order.
Before you start thinking that Coffee-Grabbers are some kind of perverts that savor in the pure activity of grabbing a coffee (“uu the texture”), let me julia-splain it to you (on the other hand who knows, after all, I’m pretty new in the circles, maybe I don’t get a whole texture yet).
As I watched my American Friend disappearing in the weird hours of days and nights (ok, I’m being slightly overdramatic here), I finally asked “First of all, how many friends do you have and secondly, is this amount of coffee even legal?” she laughed and deflecting my second question (as we all do in a Grad school) answered “Oh, no, I’m actually grabbing coffee with many different people, like Professor X, businesswomen Z (…), just because I think it might be good to talk to them (..)”
“Wait, wait, wait.” I said after a moment to collect my thoughts, which were running a very unsuccessful marathon in too many different directions as the invisible architecture of designing my own American Dream unraveled before me; to finally meet at a finish line of this four-words disjuncture:
“You can DO that?!”
Let me explain something here: in my mind, the possibility of casually “grabbing a coffee” with a Very Important Professor, without any good reason – like the end of the world coming where I’m the only one with the cure – lies somewhere between the possibility of having a Tea Party with Queen of England and receiving a Noble Price in Literature by just ordering it on Amazon.
Intrigued, after a very detailed investigation and many, many lat-ay’s after, I’ve deconstructed what elements are embedded in this particular coffeescape into this particular definition:
// Coffee-Grabbing //
/verb/ [shows ergonomically countable and extrastatecraft-y uncountable action]
Socially designed semi-professional apparatus of somehow an escapist dream of a business meeting; falls under a timeframe of drinking one coffee – some might argue that a meeting’s success is measured by how fast someone drinks it; “coffee-grabbing” reenacts Kerouac’s fantasy on being on the move while escaping the inescapable capitalistic workingsphere; as conversation flows according to actors who co-design it in a seemingly flexible environment, where the power of infrastructure is shaken; it’s the romanticized idea of meeting strangers and the modern symbol of an American promise of endless possibilities and equality; mostly happens in a semi-open public space with an easy way to opt-out.
And as I hope to create my own deglobalized power structures in the future, for now, I am committed to making invisible-visible because I do too believe in this romanticized idea of grabbing a coffee across systems.
So, when I met for a coffee (different type of meeting) with my International Friend, I shared with her my newest findings, curious if she knew about this.
And yes, as you might guess her reaction was:
“Wait. You CAN DO THAT?”
P.S. Personal Coffee Score for now: 2 really nice Coffee Grabbing meetings, 1 pending, 1 water-based meeting, which is a different kind; X number of unknown meetings to come.
*Note: it is VERY important to have an American Friend (just grab one along with a coffee) in the American land, that you can treat (with love) as a Walking Dictionary and harass (with consent) with millions of questions. It’s as important as having an International Friend (or a Polish one – you can’t go through life without at least one Polish friend, quote me on that).
**Just a small, linguistic, decolonizing nod of appreciation to other languages, and an attempt to expand this blogpost infrastructure behind the frame to at least “Google it”. Did it work…?
Mentioned themes from a chosen bibliography:
“What Is At Stake With Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable”. 2018. Taylor & Francis. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17547075.2018.1434368.
Meadows, Donella H, and Diana Wright. 2015. Thinking In Systems. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2008. Disjuncture And Difference In The Global Cultural Economy. SAGE Publications.
Easterling, Keller. 2016. Extrastatecraft. London: Verso.
Kerouac, Jack. 1957. On The Road. Viking Press.