suck it

When I was in my twenties in Sweden all of my friends, or almost all of my friends, and I, smoked. You were allowed to smoke in bars, restaurants, and coffee shops, and there were designated smoking areas in university buildings, work places, and in every public waiting area. People smoked everywhere. Waiting for the bus, driving, and at home. You could smoke in air planes. One of my former boyfriends commented years later that I had been the only one able to smoke while riding my bike. I don't think that was true. I saw lots of people do it.

Yesterday I went for a walk on the trail in my little California town. I walk most days. Lots of people use the trail, most of them doing some kind of serious exercise. Biking, running, hiking. The trail goes to the mountains and you can get a good workout.

I met this couple. We didn't talk, they just came towards me on the trail. They were ordinary enough, dressed in exercise outfits, walking briskly. The man held a cup of coffee in his hand. You see that a lot, actually. People get coffee at one of the cool downtown coffee places, and take it on the trail. It looks weird to me. How do you keep a decent pace while handling hot coffee? And why would you want to walk and drink out a cup at the same time?

Then it hit me. Coffee is the new smoking.

Coffee drinking fills the same emotional needs as smoking does. It's something to hold onto in life. Like a teddy bear. And, it's something to suck on, like a pacifier or a mother's nipple. I think that's why those plastic containers, or the straws, are so popular.

It's also something to help build your own personal brand. Your identity. People's coffee orders are complex and specific because we think that is a way of knowing who we are. Just as smoking Marlboros or Camels made my friends and me into who we thought we were. People know turn into "Peet's People", or "vanilla soy latte", "tall" or "short".

I did a little googling, and here is the most complicated Starbucks order on the interwebs: "a tall half-skinny half-1 percent extra hot quad shot (two shots decaf, two shots regular) latte with whip".

That kind of reminds me of my 27 year old self, rolling my own cigarettes from a specific brand of Norwegian tobacco, and smoking them in 1950s cigarette holders.

what we claim

I've taught a class that discusses media images of underrepresented groups this summer. To add perspective I've invited as guest graduates of the department, former students who a few years out of school are eager to come back and talk. They even admit to missing school...

Erika, one of the young women who came in last week, reminded me of something that had happened in one of her classes a couple of years ago.

I often ask students how they identify - how they choose to label themselves. There is a pattern: Very few white Americans identify as "American" when they're in the US. Instead they refer to their countries of origin, and may say that they are Irish and Italian, Irish and German, French, or Portuguese, even if they have never visited any of those countries and their families have been American citizens for generations. It's an interesting phenomenon, and often the focus of several class discussions. It is odd that white people, who in many ways feel the most ownership of the country, and who enjoy privilege and positions of symbolic power, do not talk about themselves as American.

Erika remembered that she had been the only one in her class of 30 or so students, a predominantly white group, to use the word "American". She referred to herself as Mexican-American. Her parents are both immigrants from Mexico, but, she says, "I was born here, I am American".