People At A Coffee Shop

People At A Coffee ShopFour years of free tuition to attend an elite, top-ranked institution doesn’t come without a certain price.

At the university where Trinity (they, them) graduated, an incoming freshman is four times more likely to be from the top one percent than from the bottom twenty.

The challenge for students like Trinity is to find community and keep pace with others who can elect not to work and are able to focus solely on their course load, who enjoy coaches and connections and can consider unpaid internships that open doors.

They, Trinity Collins, are more than grateful for the package that included free tuition. But as an undergrad, while maintaining a 3.8 GPA, they worked full time to pay for housing, fees, textbooks and living expenses. All of this while being the primary caregiver for a family member.

In hindsight the migraines, chronic pain and a missed semester were all but inevitable. And in retrospect those remote classes during the pandemic were a godsend for the overextended undergrad. Trinity became close to the members of an online “pod,” coming to share an identical tattoo with one of them.

Trinity notes the disconnect that a university business model which enjoys an endowment of $14 billion, and was so generous to them individually, exploits the labor of students, athletes, TAs and adjuncts alike.

They, Trinity, may continue their pursuit of history through a joint Masters and PhD Program. Understanding the past, they believe, is key to dealing with developments that today’s powers-that-be didn’t see coming, or chose to ignore.

At this particular moment, after graduating, Trinity looks forward to building a bit of savings and to enjoying the freedom and the luxury to simply “do things.”

…floating in a most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today.*

She can expect to experience 3Gs of gravity during liftoff followed by intermittent episodes of weightlessness.

Her name is Maya Vezner. And she is preparing to launch.

She is showing clear signs of the auto-immune response known as “senioritis” which allows even the most driven seniors to step back and stabilize before they step through the hatch.

Her hours for the most part be will her own. She’ll be freed from the class schedule she’s followed for years.

She’ll be as independent as she wishes to be. Reporting back to home base will depend on what she’s facing at any given time.

She’ll choose the diet she wishes to follow. She’ll manage her laundry.

Now a debit card, now a meal plan card, now a campus services account. Credit cards marketers will chase after her while student loan servicers will be circling in the waters around her.

Maya might meet lifelong friends on her first day in her residence hall, or not. First roommates are as random and they are important.

Her current plans are to pursue mathematics and engineering with an eye toward sustainable energy. In other words, you and I have a stake in her success.

Maya’s going to change. She’ll be free to reinvent herself. And as soon those know and love her become accustomed to the new Maya Vezner, she’ll change again.

* David Bowie

The actor and playwright in residence here at our humble coffee shop is a perfect fool and an absolute genius.

Shakespeare’s ‘fools’ are anything but. They provide wit and wisdom to the fevered souls in his tragedies.

As an actor Ron has played Feste, Touchstone, Trinculo and Lear’s unnamed jester.

But actually the Bard isn’t the only son of the sceptered isle Ron has brought to life.

He created a one-person show about Winston Churchill and took it to Off Broadway where it scored an extended run. The work centers on the chillingly prescient Iron Curtain speech the former prime minister delivered in Iowa in 1946.

He and Winston returned to sell out to rave reviews in Chicago as well.

Ron Perfect-Pitch Keaton started out as a song-and-dance guy. His studies of the International Phonetic Alphabet allow him to conjure up dialects ranging from an Irish brogue to a Wyoming drawl to a Churchillian growl.

The stage is the only honest work Ron’s ever considered. He’s grown from one type of role to another, working every year straight over the past half century.

“This is what I am.” he says. Even during those early years of palpable stage fright he needed to perform to stay whole. God knows I don’t do this for the money, he says with a well-rehearsed eye roll.

A performance is measured by what an audience gives back. Gasps, laughs and silences speak volumes to a performer. By the end of the first act Ron knows if he’s earned his bow.

His is a no-nonsense 90º bend at the waist with arms hanging loosely down.

The kid and the machine had squared off against each other for the prescribed twelve years.

Our educational system, as a practical measure, is focused mostly on STEM and the Humanities. It doesn’t embrace visual arts in the way students like Alden Rathburn need.

Alden’s about to enter a college that will level the playing field. It’ll be as demanding as any university but with requisites geared to students with exceptional artistic and creative abilities.

Alden will say goodbye to his high-school, artist-in-residence status and begin pulling all-nighters to compete among his peers. He’ll face the four-steps-forward, three-steps-back realities required to excel.

Since early on he’s been creating videos, often following a tribe of local skateboarders of which he’s a charter member.

As a large man, as a skateboarder with militantly red hair, he represents the kind of motley menace parents used to warn about until “ollies,” “kickflips” and “grinds” captured the entire world’s imagination at the Tokyo Olympics.

The countdown is on.

There is one discipline Alden would like to explore that isn’t listed anywhere in his four-year syllabus but that may be as important as any of the others.

“I want to learn to take risks,” he says.

We’re going to need people like Taylor Olson to man the wall.

The giants sat in the window of our corner coffee shop whispering into Taylor’s ears.

On one side was the Swedish pacifist who invented dynamite, on the other was the Father of the A-Bomb.

Taylor is working on a PhD dissertation about “ethical intuition” applied to the technology that promises to affect us in ways its creators don’t yet understand. We are going to need a firewall to protect us.

If Artificial Intelligence turns ugly, Taylor will tell you, we’ll have ourselves to blame. If we feed it junk information, indulge its tantrums and don’t set boundaries while it’s still in its infancy, well then, that’s on us.

Contrary to early reports, AI will not be all powerful. It doesn’t process information easily from one field to another. It’s not good with inconsistency. Irony and hypocrisy may trip it up.

Taylor would prefer a university career rather than enter the private sector. But as the experience of Nobel and later Oppenheimer can attest, much of the funding for this revolutionary technology will come from the military industrial complex.

His reading of philosophy, Kant on morality in particular, dovetails with his pursuit of mathematics and computer logic. But the more Taylor comes to understand, the more questions he finds to ask.

It was good be inside on that raw Wednesday afternoon, out of the rain.