Tag Archives: coffee

Independence: A Morning

Yesterday I had my first guitar lesson, 27 days after the day I bought my first guitar. Of course, everything I had practiced from online tutorials had to be thrown out the window. I like my teacher. He gave me exercises, but the first exercise he gave me was this: finger independence.

In the finger independence exercise, you lay all fingers down on one string and slowly shift one finger one at a time to the next string. You are never to do two or three at once, even though you will find your fingers doing it. I found my fingers were not as dextrous as I had always been pleased and proud to consider them, and I’ve been enjoying struggling through the exercise this morning as I slowly woke up. I’m on my second coffee.

This exercise makes no sound. You do not pick, you do not strum. The strings are muted. This is simply an exercise in movement control of the left hand. I am trying to re-teach my hands to “think” independently, so that when called on, each individual finger can act adverse and contrary-wise to the other.

As the sky went from the deep dim blue of early morning to the light white of the usual Seattle day fog, I have been doing this exercise on and off. Slowly, in my mind, an idea was developing, though I did not know what it was yet.

“Are you practicing? Can I play music?” asked my husband after he woke up, a bit later than me because he is sick.

“I am practicing, but it doesn’t make sound,” I said. “Go ahead.”

With the music and my husband, the apartment began to wake up. My cats started leaping about. One even showed interest in my guitar for the first time, much to my horror. Coco, the one who had surgery and is recovering very well, was sulking on a blanket, miserable in her protective cone.

All the time I was thinking of my fingers as numbers, like I used to when I played cello years ago. “4,3,2,1” I whispered as I released each corresponding finger. “1,2,3,4.”

I put my second coffee in a pink mug with a gold handle and eyelashes painted on it. It was the first purchase I made for myself that had no use other than aesthetics. I still feel a little strange using such a leisurely commodity.

The idea awakened. I gained financial independence only months ago. This morning, slowly, I realized… I am back at square one, where even my fingers can become independent.

Comfort Blog

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a blog solely devoted to depicting comfort? Every morning you would drag yourself out of bed and debate whether you should make coffee or just die on the couch. Eventually you put the kettle on in preparation for the easiest coffee – french press. Then your favorite part of the morning begins. You walk to your ergonomic chair that cost you almost as much as your rent back in the day, sit down, feel your lower back begin to loosen, click the ergonomic mouse, and your computer wakes up – slowly, like you. As the monitor lights up, the rush of light propels you to open your favorite browser (Chrome, duh) and go to yourcomfortblog.com (is that a real website?). Gradually, the white changes to light pinks and blues and you see pictures of merchandise from your favorite movies (The Dark Crystal) and art featuring your favorite foods (cheese!). Then you get to the good part, the blurb. It reads like Virginia Woolf, but happy. It describes a big comfy t-shirt and a hot but not too hot cup of coffee made from thin air and some retro steam punk designed technologies that are still ergonomic (good, you like that). It describes the thoughts that go into writing and thinking and it all feels very meta the way a comforter feels very soft on the skin.

Your tea kettle clicks. Time to grind the coffee. Your morning visit with this paradise website is over. But never fear, because you have your light pink “Git it Gurl” shirt on over the fluffiest pajama pants you ever owned and you’re using your favorite light blue mug and you’re going to sit on your light blue couch and watch the steam come out of that Raven’s Brew coffee (which also sounds cool as a bonus) as the waves of puget sound rock in the far distance, outside where wind and rain exist.

But not inside.

Wouldn’t it be nice.

Measurements

A few years ago I paid for a lesson from a coffee professional.  She had a recipe she had perfected and she taught it to me.  When it was time to ladle out the coffee beans, I didn’t see a scoop.

“Where’s the scoop?” I asked her.

“You can just use your hands,” she said.

Now, this made it no less precise.  We were using a scale to measure exactly how many grams of coffee were going into this (it was the kalita wave technique, by the way).

So for the past two or three years, I have been using my hands.  Getting a handful, then controlling whether they poured out one by one or by the dozen.  My hand would get dirty.  I guess coffee is oilly.  I would have to wash it immediately afterward.

This Christmas my little sister got me a hand made wooden coffee scoop.  It was too cute not to use so I began measuring the grams, only using the scoop, and I realized that three slightly heaping scoops were almost exactly to the gram as much as the recipe required.

So for the past eight days I have been using the scoop, and I put away the scale.

This got me thinking.  It’s nice to work blind, but would it be as satisfying if I didn’t know scientifically that within a certain margin of error this was exactly how much coffee I wanted?  Yet I know, over time, I’m going to start using less, or more beans from scoop to scoop and I won’t go back and measure it later.  Plus, now I’m using it for the french press I got for Christmas, and that requires a completely different measurement.

I am a Computer Scientist.  That means I have a scientist’s brain but I like shortcuts.  Apparently it applies to coffee as well.  It doesn’t hurt that I am also an artist.  I like to improvise.  How can one ever reconcile these opposing forces?

I think the secret is to alternate.  Measure, plan.  Then throw it away.  Then take it out of the trash and compare.  Measure again.

In cooking, I learned from the very precise measurements of Maangchi, but most Koreans of the older generation (and my husband) don’t cook with measurements.  I started with Maangchi, memorized her recipes, and now I am adding flavors of my own.

After all – I want to be a astrophysicist.  After all that mathematics, they still take a picture of the sky, do they not?