I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Santa Clara.

It’s stunning. Just a couple miles down the road from Google and you can practically smell it in the air. Or maybe that’s just the coffee. Although, when you get down to it coffee is probably what fueled the tech boom in the first place. Nonetheless, you can certainly see it in the proliferation of electrical outlets, charging stations, and people on laptops.

As an aside, you should watch The Internship if you haven’t seen it. Funny movie! As another aside, this movie first introduced me to the term Googleyness.

Within my earshot three teenage boys kill time, one with a Frappuccino, while another—this one with an iPad—laments his uncertainty over when he should leave and how early he should arrive home and if he were to get there before it ends—whatever it is—his mom will know he never went.

His anxiety is palpable.

“I guess I could just sit outside the house. I don’t know.”

This is the challenge of the ages. At least his age of leisure where he’s using his time with friends not doing whatever he should be doing to instead sit in Starbucks, taking his tablet out, getting frustrated at his situation, putting it back in his backpack. Loud exhale. Pull it back out. Tap the tablet and sigh.

Youth is hard!

I mean that. Relatively speaking. It’s hard in a relative way where the people going through it have limited experience with what life involves coupled with unreasonable levels of hormones coursing their bodies every moment of the day.

The only answer to this much turmoil is to get his your Frappuccino. Obviously. Which he has done.

Discussion follows about the unreasonableness of high school stipulations around attending some sort of special event or competition at another school. On multiple days. Involving driving on freeways—the 880 and the 17 in this case.

His buddies get up and leave, one saying something to him on the way out. He grabs his backpack and hurries after.

“No, it’s all right… Because my mom’ll kill me.”

No more so than if she had born witness to his utter waste of a sunny afternoon rent from the jaws of obligation.

Looking back, I realize a lot of adolescence is filled with seemingly interminable (and actually short) periods of boredom, the unbearableness of expectations and tedium when maybe I just wanted to… I don’t know… do something else.

There is a reason George Bernard Shaw said youth is wasted on the young. Almost everything is as intact as it’s ever going to be. Physicality, energy, recovery, skin tone. We only lack perspective and experience to remind us the grass was in fact greener in our own pasture than we realized at the time.

I like to think that if I’d blown off whatever it is, I would have done something with that time. Or maybe just enjoyed sitting with my friends and talking about anything else at all.

I like to think that.

But, who am I kidding. Now I just want a Frappuccino.