The funny thing about coffee conversations is that they tend to be about everything, and nothing.  (footnote coffee conversation: people sit down to have coffee and talk about almost anything, except work matters).  When you have to really think about it, they do not amount to something – like close a business deal or a book project – more than a few “I concur” nods.   Even if you win over an argument, you won’t get promoted in your job.  The best that you’ll ever get to having a reward for thinking out loud is that the cute guy on the other table in the coffee house might notice you for five seconds.  Conversations lack the studied focus of writing nor the zealous passion of a debate.  They’re always multi-linear narratives.  They often stretch for hours without really coming to a climax or a conclusion unlike a play or a song.  They’re pretty much like a hamster on a wheel race.  The worse thing is that you spend good enough time nitpicking your brain strategically positioning how you will fire your next rebuttal or maneuver a topic to make the conversation alive and going only to end up having all your pent up energies go to the trash bin once everyone’s finished with his coffee.  Conversations only stop not when a topic has been thoroughly dissected, but when people start to look at their watches and worry about having to catch the last bus.    

And yet we have this unending compulsion to waste time for a coffee and some chit chat.  There are probably million reasons why we do so, and we can’t even begin to list them down.   In Manila, coffee at Starbucks or Seattle’s is usually an occasion for a reunion – among grade school/high school/college classmates or long lost friends, balikbayan friends, or even officemates who do not see/talk with each other at work.  Many gays date at Starbucks for reasons only they know why.  

The conversations over coffee are one of the very few times in our lives when we’re assured of a “real” audience.  They’re one of those few times where our opinions – in a world drowning with opinions from the Internet to a stranger who blogs – get to be valued no matter how stupid they are, because first: our coffee-mates have no choice but to listen, and second: they have no choice but to comment.  It doesn’t matter whether we are politically correct or even knowledgeable about, say, baby diapers when our new-mother friend begins to compare diaper products.  Our useless advice to her will still be acknowledged. 

Of course, there are light coffee conversations and there are heavy intellectual ones.  It doesn’t at all depend on who you’re coffee-ing with as much as on what the topic is all about.  You can have light conversations like Piolo Pascual and his skin or the new guy you’re dating online.  And you can elevate Piolo to a discussion on queer sexuality, Zizek, and even link him with as disjointed a world as Cecil Licad.  You can discuss Piolo’s skin with a big time professor from a big time university in a third-world-country pretending to be first-world (read Philippines).  And attempting to connect Piolo with Marxism is possible and can clearly be understood in an un-intellectual language. 

I’ve met so-called politically-opinionated and highly-intellectual people who feel the obligation to put on their intellectual hat in a coffee talk, but somehow somewhere the ghost of this-is-just-coffee-talk-change-topic possesses them and they end up like, well, ordinary people.  Take for example a dinner over at friends’ place last week.  While sipping coffee there was suddenly a break-in news on TV about Con-Ass.  Everybody and his mom had an opinion, of course. Someone defined the parameters of Con-Ass and distinguished it from Con-Con like a lawyer.  One girl did a monologue about the essence of democracy in Asia, and her boyfriend rejoined her in a soliloquy on sovereignty, patriotism, and indigenous rights.  The host of the coffee session said he wasn’t able to vote during the last presidential elections.  I said “Me too”.  Everyone didn’t vote.  Then Susie mentioned that GMA Channel 7 is putting up a new show that’ll pit against Boy and Kris’s evening entertainment news.  We all tuned in to the TV to check if it was already on-air. 

Some people I know have written books about theories on Philippine society, the arts and the sociology of Philippine films but would love nothing but gossips during coffee talks.  And when they do deal with serious topics, they deal with them in conversation-mode; meaning, they probably won’t even write about the things they say over coffee.  The way they end a subject in a conversation won’t definitely be the same when they’re concluding an essay or a chapter for a book.  One incident shows how this is: I was having coffee with this professor whose stature is of national note about the death of Philippine cinema.  My friend was scrutinizing the state of the business of film making in the country and the cultures that have engendered practices that ultimately led NOT to its dying and debacle state but to its “death”, and his reservations for Indie films in reviving the industry (this conversation was five years ago; we all know Indie films are currently the OFWs of the film industry).  He was indicting key players that were responsible for this so-called death of Philippine cinema, and was short of cursing them to hell.  In the middle of his impassioned lecture, his phone rang.  It was from his boy toy who wanted to meet up right away.  As with his hasty conclusion about the state of Philippine cinema, the ending of our conversation was as abrupt as logging out of Facebook.

Something happens during a conversation that makes one look like he’s just drawing circles.  I’ve seen many “intellectual” performers (those guys who tend to grandstand over a topic that they feel they have authority over or responsibility to dominate unless their intellect be challenged; or those who name drop Benedict Anderson and national artists as friends) during coffee sessions who, in the act of performing, become the opposite of the identity they want to project.   There was this professor who was highly critical of nativistic framing and wanted to impress upon foreign coffee-mates on how well he could defend his stance (or how well he spoke English);  when his ideas were being interrogated, he got confused and started defending nativism.  So much for consistency. 

Last night I had coffee with two friends who met for the first time.  The initial topic was expensive sports such as diving.  Then it shifted to marketing Philippines to Asian middle class tourists, damaged culture, inventing culture, reinventing culture, etc.  Then we jumped to a discussion of local accents.  I asked my girl friend why she doesn’t use Facebook more often, and she said she got tired of posting pictures of places she’s been to because she doesn’t want to brag about them.  I realized I didn’t need to ask such a stupid question, and she probably felt she didn’t need to give an answer.  But we’re having a conversation, for chrissake.