When visiting a few weeks ago, my mom commented on our kid’s routines. “Wow, you really keep them on a schedule!” She had said, or something to that effect. Praising my wife and I for being diligent about things like brushing teeth and bedtime—which I’ll admit fluctuates pretty wildly despite my wife’s best efforts. When I come home and haven’t seen anyone all day, I tend to want to draw things out and sometimes, bless her, she’s too tired to keep reminding me that 7:30 passed half an hour ago. For my part, I always assume each night that we’ve decided (tacitly, of course) to do things differently. I don’t know why I always think this.
But, thankfully, I’m not writing about children’s bedtimes, or even the importance of keeping children on a schedule. I’m writing from LA, while at a conference, and completely off my routine (for adults, we call a schedule a routine to take away the aspect of volition). Before I left, I looked forward to the casting off the mundane and doing something different in a different place. And while I haven’t been entirely disappointed with the trip, it’s made me incredibly aware of how important my own routine (or schedule) has become to me.
First of all, eating. My family helps to keep me in check with regular eating habits. When I’m on my own, I will delay meals all day, especially when I’m not in a place where I can get something I want, or if the price is too high. For example, breakfast is being offered at the hotel right now, but I can’t bring myself to go down and eat the lukewarm potatoes or the sugary instant oatmeal packets. I probably should, I have an all-day conference, ahead of me, but I think they will serve lunch. Which reminds me, I need to find the tickets they gave us for that.
Second, there is sleeping. Without kids to put to bed, hell, without the whole usual bustle of the day behind me, sleep, especially in a hotel room, feels pretty arbitrary. Sure, I feel tired, but when I’m in the room getting ready for bed, I feel just as much like I could put my clothes back on and start the day as I do to get in bed. When I am in bed, I read. Normally, I read a page or two and I can’t keep my eyes open, but in the hotel, pages become chapters, and chapters accumulate into those all-night reading session I used to do in the 24-hour diner when I was in college. I think almost excitedly “maybe I’ll read the whole book tonight!” but since I am now biologically incapable of sleeping in past 6am (even with the hotel blackout curtain down), this is not a good idea. So, I reluctantly turn off the light and put my book down. Sometimes, with the whole family in a small hotel room, I’ll admit it gets warm, and there are the various sounds of everyone sleeping and, on hotel beds, my kids tend to want to sleep sideways for some reason, so I often have a pair of feet pushed against my back, sometimes kicking. But these things, I don’t know, they add to the soporific quality of the night; it’s hard to resist their inducement to sleep, and even if I wake up several times in the night, I usually have no trouble falling asleep. When I am in the hotel room alone, however, I put the book down and hear the hotel through the walls. I hear the murmurs and booms of conversation, I hear the freight train whistle outside, I hear the air conditioner kick back on. So, I put my ear plugs back in, but sleeping on my side, one of them is mashed between the pillow and my ear canal. I am aware of the pressure and discomfort and most of the conversation next door (or above me?) still filters through. I think of nothing and go into something like a self-induced daze. It is not sleep, but it makes the time go by quickly on the clock. In the morning, I am not sure if I have woken up, or only decided to leave the bed. Either way, I am very tired.
The conference itself is completely out of my routine. I am not accustomed to being around such large numbers of wideawake and made-up people. They seem to strut and do everything in a way that, at once, draws attention to themselves and away from me. As one in the crowd, I feel my sense of individuality threatened, and, to mollify it, I find someone who seems amenable and begin to talk their ear off, until they have to politely remind me that we are not there to talk, but to go to sessions to listen to others talk. Oh yes, I nearly forgot. The reason I am here, a proposal I sent in over six months ago. A proposal that was accepted, and then planned into a 45-90 minute workshop session, but when I inquired about length was given a scant 15 minutes, actually ten, as five should be reserved for questions.
I race off to find the room where I am to present, someone else is in there presenting, I try to listen, but when they offer a QR code on screen for the presentation slides, I hold up my phone only pretending to scan the code. I am waiting for my chance to speak, hoping I will have an audience more attentive than I was in this presentation.
At the computer to get set up, there is a tangle of what are called dongles, but none of them seem to offer an old-fashioned USB port. The CPU is, of course, behind lock and key, so there will be no getting to that. I attempt to use one of the armory of dongles to plug my computer directly in, but nothing comes up. Meanwhile, people are coming into room and greeting me, asking which session is this. Is it “Advancing Learners’ Understanding with Motivation, etc. etc.?” I proposed the name of the session six months ago when I was sitting in a café 800 miles from here. I do not know the name of my own session. I tell the woman “yes”, then “no”, and then, to avoid further embarrassment, I turn my attention back to the computer, hoping someone else can tell her what session she is in.
The interesting thing here is that I used to do this sort of thing—conference presentations, that is—all the time. For years, such presentations where a very regular part of my life. Sometimes I led two or three different workshops in a single week. But since returning to the States and having kids, I propose sessions mainly to stay connected to the world that was once so much a part of my life. However, I have forgotten how to interact with it in the same way, and nothing seems capable of bringing it back.
Certainly not the presenting itself. I admit, I did a better job today than I did last August at a conference in Berkeley where I was possibly even more exhausted, but, as before, there were only about 10 people in the room, and I can’t be sure how much I was able to reach them with my message. And then my time is up, it’s someone else’s turn to figure out the dongles, and I disappear back into the crowd.
That afternoon, for lunch, I eat the complementary salad in the sun, but the afternoon, for LA, is cold. I have made the mistake of so many tourists in San Francisco. Hearing “California” and imagining that palms only grow where the temperature is regularly in the 80s, they fail to bring layers. Of course, this is the sunny, palmy part of California, but, in such a dense mass of urbanity, one forgets the ocean is so near with its upwelling of great amounts of cold water and that, after all, it is still November in the northern hemisphere.
In the evening, I go back to my room and I transfer my attention from the conference app on my phone to the map app where I look for a place to eat. When I get back in the rental car—a necessary choice in LA despite what everyone says about difficult parking and availability of Ubers, etc.—I turn on the directions app and the cold voice directs me through neighborhoods, highways, and warehouse areas where coyotes trot without concern for the barrage of traffic. After I eat and wander around, meet up with old friends, I consider going somewhere else; it is still early, but, there is still more conference tomorrow and all this phone use makes me feel drained in the way that sitting in the car all day makes one feel like sitting down the moment you exit the car. I go back to the room and begin reading, only to find (am I doing this on purpose?) another reason to pick up my phone. God help the single urban dweller in this era, there is no sufficient reason to ever put the phone down!
The most difficult adjustment to being on the conference schedule is that I can’t seem to accommodate a good cup of coffee into the morning routine. The first session is at 8:45. I am about a 15-minute drive away, but my hotel is in the middle of a vast medical campus. I try the hotel coffee—terrible. It is watery and tastes dried out. I arrive at the conference early the first day so to take advantage of the breakfast offering. There are casks of “French Roast”, and I can’t help but to hope, but, again, watery. After two kids, and, thus, a great deal of time spent at home in the morning, my coffee brewing methods have moved away from the American copious-amounts-of-watery-coffee to a more European (or so I imagine) single-cup-of-strong-coffee. I like to be able to taste the coffee and while my sense of taste may have atrophied in my advanced age, I don’t think it’s gotten too bad. Rather, I think many people—in this age of energy drinks—who brew coffee, don’t drink it themselves, hence the wateriness, the rest of us are forced to sip and sigh. Another cup of watery diner coffee. At least its hot.
My second morning of the conference, I am resolved to have a good cup of coffee. Given my isolated location—despite being in the middle of the city—this will have to mean Starbucks. I have already used the map application on the phone several times to see my options and without getting in the car and driving 20 minutes in any direction, Starbucks is my only option. The map shows three within walking distance.
The first of them is practically across the street. They open at 6am. It’s already almost 7, so I throw on a sweatshirt and head out into the brisk LA morning. On this medical campus, the Starbucks is not a standalone affair, but something buried within a hospital building. On the street closest to where it is shown, there is no entrance to the building, just the corner of an imposing parking garage. I walk up the block and eventually find three entrances. I select the one closest to where the Starbucks icon was shown on the map. There is a courtyard with picnic tables—a good sign—and among these tables, a sandwich board announcing the proximity of the Starbucks. On the ground are arrows with Starbucks logos—this is the second time while in LA I have found myself following such arrows. Not a good sign.
The arrows lean to a door which is locked (there’s a trashcan placed directly in front of it). However, from the vantage by this door, I can see another courtyard below and, bizarrely, a pylon for the parking garage with a Starbucks logo on it which gives the impression the Starbucks is, perhaps, in the parking garage. Seeing no other option, and assuming I just need to get to a ground floor somehow, I go into the parking garage where hospital workers are streaming out toward the medical campus all of them in maroon scrubs. I am the only one in street clothing and walking against their flow, I can feel their practiced avoidance of encounter with someone unknown and out-of-step. Despite all the people around, no one makes eye contact. It would be pointless to ask for directions. In the bowels of the parking garage, I find a custodian who seem more approachable. He tells me I need to go out the exit and says something else about a little door or something. I take this to mean that I’m close and head for the parking garage exit.
I come out at the base of the building where the Starbucks, presumably, is. The logoed pylon is directly above me, but it is a maintenance area. I am surrounded by trash cans, and such. All the doors are flat gray utility, the type that only open from the inside. I exit this utility courtyard and I am back where I started. Alright, the hell with this, I think, I’ll get in the car and drive somewhere.
The windows are fogged, the sun is coming up and glaring on the windshield, I’m driving up a steep hill with the car directly facing the sun and I haven’t had any coffee. I can hear my wife’s voice telling me not to be frantic. “I’m not being frantic” I respond out loud to the imagined voice. “I’m merely trying to get some coffee!” This is beginning to get ridiculous.
The medical campus extends for blocks and blocks and is bordered by a highway and train tracks. There is a kind of civilization in the campus area, but it differs from the typical commercial American landscape. Hospitals are supposed to obfuscate. They offer passive, sculpted fronts to the street while, inside, there are bodily fluids, there is pain, and even death. The taboo nature of the purpose of a hospital in our culture renders it blank and sterile and makes it reluctant to offer coffee to those outside its walls. The coffee is only available to the initiated and, most likely, is watery anyway.
Once again, I scrounge my way deep into a courtyard in search of the icon on my phone and following another custodian’s directions. There is a cold and dark Panda Express and the trashcans have Starbucks logos on them. But, again, doors are locked and, on a Saturday, the courtyard is empty. No workers in scrubs here. I check my phone. This location is closed until Monday. Damn.
I’ve now been awake for over an hour and have not had coffee. I contemplate just compromising with some hotel coffee. But after all this, it is difficult to resign myself to watery, flavorless coffee. And after all, there, on the fringes of the campus, in a small slice of civilization between the highway, the medical campus on the forested hill from which issue one, two, three coyotes, there is a stand-alone, un-obfuscated Starbucks! I can see it, the logo proudly pronouncing the bounty of steaming hot, obsidian, smoky, cozy warmth. I pilot the foggy car toward the beacon, but the small parking lot is full, the drive-through snakes out into the street and there is no street parking in the small neighborhood this early in the morning on Saturday. I go around the block and contemplate throwing on the hazard lights in a red curb area, but this is a city and in cities, cars can be towed at a moment’s notice, even on a Saturday.
After circling the block, I notice that in the parking lot, someone has sort of double parked behind the parking spaces and in front of the drive through line (to picture this, just imagine a chaotic mess of cars squeezed into a very small area). I manage to turn the car around in the street and back into the parking lot between parking blocks, light poles, other cars, etc. and put my car next to the other one in an area that almost looks like it could be used for parking.
The place is busy for a Saturday. I guess it’s the effect of the “coffee desert” which everyone in this area must be subject to, at least those without a means of coffee preparation wherever they are staying. The drive-through is getting priority, mobile orders are second to be considered. I stand there watching employees prepare drinks for people who are not even there, calling out names, and setting them on the counter where they begin to get cold. No one pays attention to me. I’m trying not to feel impatient, but I notice the someone driving a very large van parked in the handicapped spot has gone out to the parking lot. “Am I blocking that van?” I think and begin to feel anxious despite the total lack of caffeine, or perhaps because of it. I continually swivel my head back and forth between the employees who are still ignoring me and the parking lot. A line begins to form behind me. Where these other people have come from, I can’t fathom. There’s certainly nowhere for them to park, and, being LA, I can’t imagine they have walked.
At last, someone comes to the counter and takes my order. Sometimes, you are lucky when only ordering drip coffee and the person taking your order will get it for you. When you are unlucky, they print a sticker for your drink as if you had ordered a matcha latte with cold foam and sprinkles. Your coffee must wait its turn behind all the other concoctions. I was not lucky, and I watched my plain cup take its place in a long line of cups. But then, miracle of miracles, another employee, or perhaps an angel, emerges from the back room, sees my forlorn and humble cup sitting there with those ready to be plied with syrups, swirls and all kinds of candies, love letters and small messages that the consumer is indeed special. The employee whisks my cup away, fills it with coffee and comes to the counter saying my name not as a question but as a statement, a glorious affirmation that, at long last, I have earned my coffee.
I cradle its munificent warmth, stride to the car (the van is gone, looks like he managed to get out), and take a drink. It is every bit as watery as the hotel and conference coffee, maybe even more so because of all I have gone through to get it. I laugh to myself and realize that, some mornings, one is just fated to watery coffee. However, tomorrow, my last day in conference land, I am going to get here earlier and I will put my drink in line with the others and request that multiple shots of espresso be dumped in, then I will get back on a plane and return to my family and my comfortable routine, largely free of apps, people wearing perfume, and poorly brewed coffee.
