My Neighborhood Starbucks

makes me feel (1) very, very old and (2) like I'm a brilliant fucking scholar. It's the oddest sensation, because normally I'm used to feeling like a totally inadequate dunce, and I'm used to going to coffee houses in college towns where most people go to study. Here, the patrons of Starbucks are giggling teenagers arriving by the droves, like 8 of them hanging out and getting caffeinated, and then giggling even more hilariously. I actually heard one girl say, "I feel like I'm too young to hang out at Starbucks..."

A lot to unpack there, so I'll just leave it.

Then there was me, with my squinty eyesight and bad posture, writing footnotes (the driest kind of writing) to document all the points in which Nehamas talks about whether or not irony is a form of deception.