I picked up our gro - I got that far then heard a thud upstairs so got up to check. It was in the 14yo’s room, I called up the stairs and she said everything’s fine. I suspect it’s that the smallest cat climbed on her bookshelf - the 14yo’s bookshelf, not the cat’s bookshelf, the cat doesn’t have a bookshelf as far as I’m concerned, while she seems to think all the bookshelves are hers - and knocked down a book onto the floor. Those small jolts didn’t begin when I became a parent but they became more frequent. As we’ve moved out of the life with babies the jolts got smaller and less often but they still come sometimes. I was talking with a friend about this the other day and we were saying that life as a parent is like having all your nerves on the outside. I wasn’t totally different pre-kids though.
Speaking of kids, mine all spent a long time today playing very nicely together on some computer game, they were competing by playing the same one player game on their own devices, starting at the same time - 1, 2, 3, go! - and being good sports with each other. It was very nice - sometimes there’s friction and all.
Okay so I went to pick up our grocery order. It’s kinda chilly today. We don’t have the heat on yet and my feet are cold - I’m pretty sure I got covid super early in the pandemic and my toes have gotten much colder ever since - and I’m wearing a sweater right now. It’s the best weather. I wish it would stop here. On the way to the grocery store I hit a drivethrough and got an egg and cheese biscuit sandwich and coffee. The biscuit’s a cheap buttermilk variety. I want to learn to make them. They’re too salty in the way potato chips are, delicious. With the egg and the melted cheese it makes three varieties of soft squishy, from toothy-chewy to gummable to you could swallow it whole as-is, and those textures complement each other. Tastes good too.
Then I had the coffee and it sucked. I’m used to that by now. I make good coffee at home. I have a little pour over cloth basket thing with a plastic stand I set on top of the mug. I often put cardamon (not sure I spelled that word right) in the grounds, it’s delicious, and sometimes a bit of honey and a splash of milk. This is to say, I’m an appreciator of tasty good coffee and would miss it if I never had it again. Sometimes I make some decaf (I have both caf and decaf beans in the freezer typically and grind them up into small jars that don’t last long), I like the tastes, and a hot drink is good too. We’re mostly a tea household, because you can make a whole pot and drink it and two more without consequence, and we have decaf tea for the evening and night. Part of the appeal is being an anglophile, if I’m honest.
But there’s something about only warm bad coffee. It’s something good to have in one’s life. I was going to say it concentrates the mind but really it deconcentrates, it focuses to unfocus - it’s like yoga. In yoga, each pose involves flexing something, stretching something, relaxing something, and as you move through a series of poses lots of your body gets flexed, stretched, relaxed, so the parts that get too much of one and not enough of another get to stop the thing they get too much of and get a little of what they get too little of. Running and weightlifting, when uncomfortable, give that effect to the mind, as does bad coffee. Running and lifting are the bad coffee of exercise. Bad coffee - notes of grass and tart green apple, overtones of burnt tire, a hint of stomach acid - concentrates the mind on the unpleasant taste and lets everything else go for a moment.
It’s a vehicle for caffeine as well, of course. That means bad coffee is especially good for a coffee nap. Let the drink pause all the unpleasant mental habits that make it harder to fall asleep, set a timer, nap hard for 20 minutes, wake up energized and ready to take advantage of the mix of alertness and temporary cessation of the usual mental routines. In a just world an afternoon bad coffee nap would be a daily ritual for all, and we’d hear fewer thuds and worry less about the ones we do hear.
