world café

transcribed (roughly, with edits) from my journal (like one with PAPER and INK; archaic, I know):

4:58 p.m.

I'm sitting in Taiwan Café, the little Chinese restaurant on the corner of Oakland and Forbes with the front door that opens to a set of descending stairs. Which is kind of creepy and ominous in the way that all basements are, but the sushi and the grinning owner who wants to hear multiple times that you are enjoying your food and the posters on the walls of silly dogs playing cards (like they think they're human! imagine!) are worth it.

Today, about half of the groups of restaurant patrons are Asian, or Asian-American, or Pacific Islander, or from the general or not-so-general vicinity of the Pacific Ocean, and the other half are White, or American, or Caucasian, or European-American-ancestral- hybrids. A couple at a booth directly in front of me is a mixture of these two.

I'm eating an "Alaskan Roll"-- that's salmon from perhaps the Pacific NW, avocado from Central or South America, seaweed from the... sea?, and rice from China. Maybe. All assumptions. While I eat, I read an assignment about the history of food for the class I have at six, rushing to finish the last chapter.

I pick up each too-big bite with chopsticks, a skill I've somewhat acquired since coming to college, and to my right, an Asian girl of indeterminate nationality watches me. I can't see her face but my peripherals tell me there are side-glances, wonder, but my peripherals could be self-conscious and/or paranoid.

A little girl to my left--who appears to be the owner's daughter since she is sitting by herself and seems to have free range to cans of soda--eats rice with a white plastic fork as she swings her feet.

I sit in Taiwan Café and I eat my sushi and I read the words in my textbook: "foods became interchangeable commodities, losing all connection to their place of origin" and I underline it,  look up, and look around, and open my eyes and see, that sometimes books can dim that thing that goes on around us: real life.