Hitting the Starbucks addition to the newly remodeled library on campus after retiring my first class of the day, my burdened, cerebrally turbulent self felt the vague onset of a nap. I made my way over to the pretentious yuppie coffee chain on this grimy, dysphoric, wet mess of a day, scanning the area for a nice place to rest before my forthcoming Yoga class. It's funny how distant and guarded people are today, as they look at you as you seem to have found a space to occupy on a public study table like, "Oh no, are you going to sit near me?", or, "Are you going to now be somewhere within the ten to fifteen square feet of my spacial occupation?" So to bypass that subtle and inane vibe in this situation, I leave at least one chair between myself and the other person. You know, because god forbid I sit next to them.
Anyway, I secured an adequate spot in the center of a long study table occupied by just a couple guys comfortably spaced (of course) from each other, and whenever in a public study-esque area like this, my first obligatory action is always the brief people scan. Well, in this case, it is, for the most part, a female scan. Now, don't get me wrong, I am soon to be happily engaged, but that doesn't mean I am no longer going to enjoy the visual pleasure afforded from an aesthetically pleasing young woman. Suffice to say, the hazel-eyed kitten sitting about six or seven yards adjacent from me at a booth table fit the bill, albeit in that generic, prep-yuppie, contemporary university college sort of way.
There is something about this generation of youth and their insatiable need to be perpetually "connected" and communicating by digital means that has been really bothering me. There were only scarcely intermittent moments where this tawny-haired life novice would retire her Blackberry to the table's surface. As if one item of modern-day gadget porn weren't enough, she of course had her sexy little Macbook Pro plopped open in front of her, providing a bluish-white fill light for her face. I never thought that one day, someone could be nonchalantly manipulating a laptop computer with one hand, and, using only the thumb, adroitly hammering in a text message (sometimes without even looking) on some smaller yet equally sleek toy on the other. I have been feeling very strongly, for most of the 2000's, that we really need to simplify in a way that is becoming progressively imperative, but each year, it seems to be getting further and further from that.
At one point we had made eye contact, and it's one of those typical things regarding green femmes of today, where they look away almost instantly, like they don't want you to have the satisfaction of them having looked at you in a way such that may cause you to believe that they perhaps, even in that transient moment, found you even slightly palatable to the eye. This is something I experience daily in my on-campus college endeavors. People seem to feel the need to be so disconnected personally in the physical, but when it comes to a petite, digital mobile display, they have no problem going all out. Also, by this comely girl's act of not allotting further occasions of eye contact makes me feel the need to reciprocate the non-favor, so as to not make her head swell at any hint of me finding her attractive. How ridiculous, right?
I wonder how, not only she, but every other eighteen/twenty-something female in this cafe would react if their dear, fancy little gizmos with such minor capacities of, say, starting their car and making pancakes for them, were to spontaneously combust. I'm confident that it would be no contest compared to, say, a loved one passing. I know that that isn't quite fair, and I'm generalizing and hyperbolizing to underline my point about our unhealthy attachment to electronic means of communication. I have been noticing that the more things convert to 0's and 1's, social warmth, humanity, humility, and chivalry severely fall to the wayside. In regards to little miss I'm-too-cute-to-sustain-you-a-look, I'm hard-pressed to imagine those delicate, young ivory hands ever, say, hammering a nail through one piece of wood into another, or, by her own will, handwriting a letter to a person in glorious ink cursive.
In the end, this pulchritudinous young lady is a palpable archetype of a yuppie, gen-z, multi-texting, candy-coated gadget toting college girl (not that there's anything wrong with that). So the looker ultimately rose from her seat to reveal her donning what could be called my visual kryptonite; black leggings hugging a curvy waist area under knee high boots. Well, at least I was now able to bury my face in my arms, with some aesthetically pleasing imagery to nap to. I don't know. You just gotta love these girls.
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