I've been at Spot Coffee
a lot lately, trying to get out of my apartment while finishing my
Capstone project for school. While I have broadband at home, my desk is
small, cramped, and a bit isolating for the 4-5 hours spent sitting
there after work doing more work.
And I'm not alone. There's a
univeral need to venture out for a little bit and be social, even if it
means going to the coffee shop with your notebook, typing away or
reading while the headphones keep motivating (I call it cranking) music
thumping in my head. Here's the cranking playlist.
Wired's article
describes this feeling pretty well. It's a topic one of my best friends
and I have discussed before: is going to the coffee shop with my
notebook and headphones and sitting there typing away sociable?
Needless to say, we disagree.
I don't always end up chatting
with someone but more often than not I do as the Wired article
suggests. The kind of people at coffee shops are typically of a
different nature. Do I go because I want to hang out with people who
are like me or is becauset I want to hang out with people who are
intellectual, creative, and otherwise cool people?
I'm looking for a place with energy and although Spot Coffee is an oasis, Rochester as a city does not have energy. Although I've posted about Richard Florida before, the excerpts below clarify what I so ineloquently described above. From his speech at CC almost a year ago:
"
You have to understand, I’m pretty darned conventional. I have no idea
what’s going on. I’m going into it with an open mind, then I start
asking people, especially young people graduating colleges and focus
groups. We start to ask them, “How do you pick a place to live and
work?” Young people, and we’re assuming they want a good economic
opportunity, and I start to hear this weird thing. “We want to move to
a place that has energy.” “Yes, we want to go to a place that has
energy.” ....
...As one of my interview subjects said, “This
isn’t about playing. It’s about recharging our batteries, about
becoming more focused on work, about release… regenerating ourselves.”
We’re getting ready, as she said, to work a second working day. A
second 8-hour day. So people wanted to be involved, and in arts and
culture, the same thing...
...I put my two boys through Purdue,
and they graduated Purdue and they had a ton of offers in the
Indianapolis area, and neither one of them stayed. And when I asked
them, ‘Boys, why didn’t you stay?’ They said, ‘It’s not enough for us
just to have a great technology job. We’re creative. We’re creative. We
want to be challenged in arts and music. We want to be challenged by
the sports we do. We want to be challenged in the other people we
meet.’” He said, “My boys moved to Seattle and San Francisco. They’re
challenged when they walk out their door in the morning in all facets
of their life.” Challenged...
...Creative people don’t want to
have stuff handed to them. We compete on merit. That’s what these focus
groups tell us. We compete on merit. We AR meritocratic people. We want
to know we’re gonna get by on our skills and our capabilities and how
good we AR, not on who mom and dad AR and how many connections we have.
That’s what people were looking for, and these were the visual cues
that they could go to a town, they could go to a town and see that it
was based on merit, because there was all these people part of the mix,
and it was open. "
Event from Last Week: Dr. Brian Greene speaking on String Theory
Event for this Week: The Lounge's Snowboard Movie/Rail Jam on Sat. night
