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My house has a radio in the shower, permanently tuned to National Public Radio, so most days begin with a splash of news. Saturdays, however, start with Car Talk, and today's episode began with the bold and not-car-related proclamation that Americans lifespans are shortened by the fact that we don't linger in coffee shops. By this crude and uninformed measure, I am likely destined for immortality; for the past six months, I have drifted in and out of neighborhood coffee houses with absurd regularity, often occupying a table for an entire day.

Though privately owned, coffee shops are often treated as public community spaces, but I have experienced them almost entirely in solitude. The music from my iPod drowns out all other sound, and I bury my attention - and my very self - in my books and my laptop. With my thesis fading behind me, I hope the solitude will begin to melt away as well.

I am sitting outside of Columbia Heights Coffee. It is too cold, and rain is threatening, but I'm determined to stay outside and read for awhile. My dog is curled up on my lap, guarding me from the cold; the hot coffee doesn't hurt.

I am reading the opening pages of Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma. I know little about either Orwell or Burma, let alone their connections, so I am surprised to learn that Orwell worked for 5 years in Burma, from age 19 to 24, as a member of the Indian Imperial Police force. Even more surprising, Larkin claims that Orwell's biographers have largely ignored these years. My own life story pivots on a mere three months in South Africa, at the age of 22, so I find it inconceivable that 5 years at such an important age, not to mention immediately preceding his writing career, would be overlooked so easily.

Emma Larkin's doorway into Burmese life is the teahouse, not horribly different from the coffee shop I'm sitting in now, except that Burmese teahouses are frequented not only by intellectuals, but also by government spies searching for anti-government whispers among the "tea-shop vapours."

My dog hops off my lap, seeking attention from the woman who has just joined my table. I see that she is about to speak, so I remove my headphones.

"My sister would love that book. Orwell AND Burma! Is it any good?"

I consider telling her that I've just learned that at 8:08am on 8/8/88, a student uprising began in Burma, though it would be brutally crushed by the military within weeks.

I consider also telling her that less than a day later, at 8:08pm on 8/8/88 in the Rocky Mountains, my aunt Jane, who has an odd preoccupation with such numerically interesting dates, would (if I am not conflating multiple childhood memories) convince my father to commemorate the moment with leftover fireworks. And that the same aunt Jane would, for my college graduation, give me a copy of Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London," and then, a few years later, his first book, "Burmese Days," along with the book, by Larkin, that I'm holding in my hand right now. I consider speculating about the strangeness of these coincidences, and wondering how long my aunt has been secretly anticipating the discovery I've just made. I consider telling her how appalled I am that I know so little of Burma, and that I knew nothing of this uprising at the time - 8/8/88 is, in my memory, a day of playful summer fireworks, not violent political upheaval.

"It seems pretty good," I mumble, "but I'm only 20 pages into it."

I put my headphones back on. The song playing is "Barricade," by Stars. Every time I listen to this song, even though I know it is about two British homosexual soccer hooligans, I briefly allow myself to imagine that it is really a reinterpretation of "Les Miserables," relocated from the 1832 student riots in Paris to the 1968 student riots in Paris. It is a song that, for me, awakens the ever-present tension between self and society, between security and service, between passive and embodied politics.

I continue reading about Burmese teahouses until the dog gets restless. Then we wander home.