Cafe #14: Friends of the Earth

Date: Saturday, 24 March 2007, 3.10pm
Location: Smith and Perry Streets, Fitzroy
Coffee: $3.50, latte - okay
Reading: The Dialectic of Enlightenment

I'm writing with my lovely felt-tip purple pen, the one that's yellow with white pinstripes!

I can't imagine that I deserve to have life feel this good. I now have: a great house, a great housemate, a bookshop job, a few fun and lovely friends, a bunch of engaged and smart people to share seminars with, and lots of spontaneity and sun. What more can a person want except not to have a job at all?

Now that I know when I work and when I go to class I think I may go to some social swing dances again or try to find some other sort of group-type thing in order to facilitate meeting more people. Maybe finding folk music nights or poetry slams or somesuch.

It has been an up-and-down week. I will not go much into the down. I completed my first assignment, a 2000-word class presentation, which I think went fine and of which I am curious to see what mark it earns. I wrote/talked about Foucault's notions of modernism - simulacra and transgression - and Lacan's mirror stage theory: Ideal-I, Gestalt, imago, ego. Then I used the theories to interpret a few of Picasso's renderings of Velazquez's painting entitled Las Meninas. It was a fun exercise to interpret art, but I am afraid I may have ran away with my concepts in the flow of writing. Did it all make sense, or was it mere linguistic flourish? This is a problem, I think, that many modern and postmodern theorists suffer from. Difficult and sometimes pretty to read, but sensible?

My first day of paid employment was yesterday and I trained at the Caulfield campus bookshop. On Monday I begin at the Alfred Hospital branch, which I understand is to be my working home. It was a good first day as far as first days at new jobs go. I am very lucky to have avoided first semester rush. But second semester rush will happen. I was also lucky to have begun work on the day of a big end-of-rush party. This involved a lovely zen-ish cafe venue with a separate function room, an open bar kindly payed for by my employer, lovely finger foods (including a huge bowl of only-okay baba ghannouj), and two fellow employees (men) with guitars and a classic rock repetoire. S opened his time as entertainer with Wish You Were Here, so I felt sure I was in the right workplace. After the men with guitars put away their guitars, the bar put on dance music and several of us, mostly women, danced and danced. It was a lovely time. I left around 9.15pm to take Ann out. We went to a cute local pub, with ratty couches and a leg-kicking lamp on the bar, and listened to a good band with an awesome slide player. All I need now is to sleep better - been a bit insomniac - and all will be perfect.

Friends of the Earth is a hippy joint - all organic and fair trade and bulk. It is a big wood shop, with books and t-shirts, candles and vegies and hippies cooking lunch. The background music is quiet and bell-like, which is a nice change from the usual cafe jazz. There are hardly any people here, but there is a child.