Social energy pulses through campus cafe.

Byline: Bob Welch The Register-Guard

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the eighth in our "Ten Cups" series based on stops at Lane County cafes.

When told that the time to be at the University of Oregon's Common Grounds Cafe was 11:30 to 2, I thought: So it's a lunch, not breakfast, place. Then, I realized UO Housing's Debbie Meyer was talking about 11:30 p.m. and 2 a.m. "That's when it's really hoppin',' she said.

If that suggests this isn't your typical coffee-and-paper cafe, then my experience at Common Grounds certainly did: nearly 100 college students yakking, sipping, eating, phoning out to friends, honing in on friends, hugging, high-fiving and philosophizing about how to change the world while simultaneously seeing how many triangular-folded "Ideas for Reducing Holiday Waste" placards they could stack on their tables.

"This place will either keep you really young or make you really old, fast," says Meyer, who oversees this and other eateries at UO's Hamilton Dormitory complex.

At age 52, I had prepared the best way I could: by taking a two-hour nap in hopes I might stay awake. Then, still groggy, I drive through lifeless streets, walked a block in midnight quiet and - kaboom! - entered a place pulsating with so much energy that, if hooked to a Lookout Point generator, could light Lane County for a month.

I'm not talking about the sort of mosh-pit gyrating that you see at, say, a Floater concert. I'm talking about a more subtle, but very real, energy: dramatic hand gestures, twirling keys on shoestrings, spinning cell phones on a table and a guy, to announce his presence to a pal, crunching the kid like a linebacker sacking a quarterback.

Things you don't see at, say, the Coburg Cafe. And things I didn't see 30 years ago when I was the "beverage boy" at the long-gone Hamilton Hall cafeteria, where students walked through the slop-and-go lines like prisoners.

Now, as I sipped my hot chocolate, the cafe's energy seemed choreographed with the sound of smoothie-making blenders, workers shouting out orders (`Teresa! Josh!'). And, of course, dozens of conversations bouncing into one another like verbal bumper cars. "I tried studying for my Biblical Hebrew test but just couldn't," freshman Jeremy Markiz says.

Lightweight!

Not far away, another freshman, Breanne Langley, was having no trouble studying for a French test - while listening, via an iPod, to a rapper named Akon.

At most cafes, multitasking means reading the paper while soaking a couple of over-easies in hash browns. At Common Grounds, it means eating pancakes brought in from the adjacent Mongolian Grill - and cooked by the housing staff as a "good luck" gesture for those facing finals - while talking to a friend, text-messaging another and, thanks to Wi-Fi, updating a MySpace page.

It's like watching time-lapse photography: people coming, going, shifting from one table to the others like human hummingbirds.

The routine is burned into these students' lives: coming nightly to the cafe that features a wooden floor; a few round, high tables; a bunch of soft, cozy booths; and an artsy, curving ceiling. "This is almost an extension of their rooms," Meyer says.

Most can be here in mere minutes. "It's always crowded and you always see people you know," freshman Jamie Heitz says.

Beyond that, students come because it's one of the few places open this late. And, for many, because it's free. "You go off campus and you have to pay money," freshman Rachel Fortuna says. (The idea!) But, here, many students just put their food and drinks on their point-system meal plans, meaning Mom and Dad ultimately pick up the tab.

It'll be reassuring for parents to know the scene looked pretty innocent to me, "Happy Days" with laptops and lattes. And at least one student did something that, three decades removed from my college days and shortly before 2 a.m., I somehow found reassuring, too.

He yawned.