She hands over the remnants of a $5 bill après 2 cups of coffee have been extracted. Christ! I thought - as I struggled to add up the price of a single coffee - that shit used to be a lot cheaper when I first started drinking coffee.
That thought is then exacerbated with slight frustration realizing the amount of money I have spent for a drink that has often left me with anxiety and an inability to sleep.
Why coffee anyways? Back then I didn’t even enjoy the taste. Why not a milkshake or something I’d enjoy, like a soft drink? And what’s so soft about that stuff anyways? In grade 5 Mr. Kelloway emptied a can of cola into a glass with an iron nail in it, by the next day it had rusted.
Imagine your Teeth Children!
In the back of my mind I always figured the reason I came to drink this damn stuff was in an attempt to socialize. And in essence it was, but it made me feel pretentious. I would have much rathered tea.
By now I think my taste in coffee is refined a little, thanks in part to Richard Brown, who would religiously stop at Esquires for freshly ground French Roast each night on our way to work, a 12 hour shift mind you!
I no longer have a feeling of pretention as I now find utility in it and look forward to a “cup o joe” several times throughout the day. I prefer to buy it freshly ground and brewed at home, where I drink it black. I also use cold water now, so as to make it taste fresher (the water I mean). I got that from Keith and Craig on long nights studying for finals, or simply for nights studying. Engineers tend to be quite studious - it's a necessary adaptation - they need to be! Unless they plan on failing. Either way, after watching them pour cold water into the kettle I asked?
"The water coming from the boiler has been there longer than the water coming straight from the tap."
"Yes, not to mention precipitate", I said.
It made perfect sense.
My Mother used to boil the kettle après dinner using cold water. Just as her mother did and perhaps every other person she has seen put water into a kettle. I couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t just put hot water in there; taking it less time to boil.
Due to my persistence upon her to fill the kettle with hot water she began boiling the water just after we would sit for a meal, on a medium heat thus the kettle would be good and ready at the end. Then to her, my problem with the kettle taking too long to boil was no longer an issue. The fact remained that she never gave me an answer to satisfy my curiosity.
The problem still roamed around in my mind though, why would one do something that was obviously counter productive and never question it?
Why do we do things a certain way and with such frequency and not think to do it differently? I’m beginning to believe that people don’t think about stuff enough.
It's like the countless number of people I've watched eat a morsel of food and introduce liquid to the situation before they've even chewed it 3 times. Day after day I watched this one fella eat his lunch, he would take a bite of food, maybe chew it once and then take a mouthful of juice. I wanted to see him eat steak to see if he would do the same thing.
I could understand doing that if you didn't have teeth, because soaking it makes for easier mastication, but apparently it's not good on the gut, or at least that's what Vendenziehoffrhen said.
