When I started this, I thought I'd give reviews on the coffee shops I visited, kind of creating a "visitor's guide" of sorts about the places, so maybe one day I could become the go-to coffee shop reviewer.
But upon further inspection, I no longer want to frame these posts in that way.
I spend so much of my time writing from a 3rd person perspective, completely removing myself from the situation. And while this is fine and appropriate and journalistically accurate in a professional sense, I do not want this blog to be another extension of that.
So, moving forward, these will be as personal as I want them to be.
I want to go back to that romantic idea of walking to the cafe on a Sunday, with nothing that you necessarily need to do, but plenty that could get done. You bring a pen and a notebook, or maybe a sketch book, or maybe a new novel, or maybe your laptop. You sit by the window and admire your latte and your chocolate croissant before you indulge. You feel both invisible among all the other patrons, but also like the main character of your own story.
And then you write. (or draw or doodle or whatever your version of this is).
That's what I'll be doing, anyway. It's a fun exercise -- going to new places and observing your surroundings. Documenting it all as though you might get quizzed on it later. I find that writing about my surroundings requires me to slow down and notice everything about them, and about myself. While I'm going back and forth in my head about how best to describe the crown molding of this adorable cafe, I simultaneously solve an issue I've been rolling around in my head for days that I never spoke about.
Being still in an ever-moving world is hard, sometimes impossible. Everything feels like a liquid, bubbling up to a gas, You can't even grasp it, it's happening so quickly. But writing things down makes it feel like a solid. It proves it happened, it proves someone noticed. It shows that someone is paying attention.
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