I am so happy right now, so very very happy.
I am at Starbucks in Streetsville, which is a village within a city and it is very chi-chi. Don't tell anyone but I have a humongous cappuccino at my elbow, fully loaded with raw sugar and cinnamon and it's in a happy Let's Merry Christmas paper cup which, as I found on Twitter, John Wiswell hates (Wiswell John Wiswell "Let's Merry"? As though I needed a reason to loathe you, Starbucks.) but frankly it makes me ridiculously happy. I like following John on Twitter, by the way. He's funny.
After two days in a truck stop where I felt like I was gonna get killed any minute, I am relaxed and mellow and listening to Joni Mitchell sing abstract jazz. There are five or six other people working around me, noses buried in their laptops. One girl has pages of music in front of her. She is slender and ethnic, a student of music, with her regal long nose and her long legs and her black coffee. There's a chubby young man in a pink shirt across from me. He is earnestly wearing a Remembrance Day poppy and his MacBook Pro is exactly like mine. There is an older woman from the suburbs, sitting at a stool at the coffee bar. Her hair is like Weezie's, the main character of my novel. She is sitting on her white down-filled ski jacket. I heart her ski jacket but if I had it it would be filthy within the first hour of use. Maybe the first half hour.
There is no Starbucks where I live. No happy Christmas cups. No earnest young men in poppies or regal-nosed music students. I want to buy a mug to take home with me, to remember how creative I felt sitting with the other laptoppers, listening to Joni, eating the cinnamon-sugar foam off my cappuccino with the slim wooden stir stick, the shiv of the Starbucks set.
