Tag Archives: Coffee

Hey look, Canadians!

This morning I was riding my bike to work. I was all hopped up on some weird kind of euphoric energy. It was a mix of a couple of things, coffee, mostly. I always have three cups, and while they always feel great, they don’t always hit me this great, like great, great. Who knows, maybe it depends on how much food I have in my stomach, I have no idea. But I was feeling amazing, like I could do anything.

And so I was riding my bike, it’s below freezing out but I wasn’t bothered. It felt terrific, totally invigorating. Not only was my mood fantastic, but my body also, I imagined it an extension of my ultra-positive state of mind. Sometimes I’ll be riding my bike in the cold and it won’t feel great at all, my body won’t feel totally up to the task, like the morning commute might be a little bit more of a chore than I’d like it to be. But this morning it was a pleasure, a real treat.

I was pedaling away, the bike at its top gear, my legs pumping away, only feeling limited by the gears of the bike itself. I’m pretty sure I had enough energy to bike across the country if I wanted to. As I was flying down Crescent toward the Queensboro Bridge, I saw these people in front of a hotel, they were packing their bags into their car.

As I got closer to the car I see it’s a Quebec license plate. And I was just feeling so happy, so thrilled to be alive, and look, Canadians! And I wanted to share some of my positive energy with the Canadians, but I was going so fast, and so my intentions were hampered by the fact I didn’t really have enough time to, one, register their presence as being a foreign one and, two, think up something nice and clever or happy or funny or whatever to say to them.

So I wound up just screaming out, “Quebec!” and giving them a thumbs-up. But, and I know I keep repeating my words here, but I really was flying, like much faster than traffic. Obviously a car can go faster than a bike. But speed bumps? Traffic lights? I was definitely cruising down Crescent much quicker than any car. So quick that I didn’t even get to look at the Canadians as I shouted out to them their car’s point of origin.

And at that point I said to myself, “All right Rob, better calm it down a notch,” because, seriously, this was almost a good mood bordering on a manic episode. I wanted to make sense of what was going on, with my ebullience (that’s a pretty big word right there, but I’m demonstrating how elevated my mood was, like big-word elevated) with the Canadians. I stopped for a second and hopped off my bike, took out my iPhone and wrote “Quebec” in the little notepad application.

So now here I am, it’s after work, the sun’s down, I’m trying to get some writing done, and I open up the notepad app, and see “Quebec.” And now I’m struggling to put myself back in those happy shoes I was wearing this morning. I’m not in a bad mood, not at all. But I definitely wouldn’t describe myself as euphoric, or ebullient.

And I’m thinking about it from the Canadians’ point of view. How was their morning? Did their bodies respond to their morning coffee in the same way that mine had? Maybe they drank too much, it left them a little jittery. Or maybe not enough and they had a killer tension headache. That always happens to me when I’m away from home. I don’t have my kitchen, my coffee pot, my routine, and so I’m always feeling under caffeinated on the road.

And they were packing up, so, what, New York vacation over? Already? But it must have felt like they just got here, like there was still so much that they didn’t get to see. And did it live up to their expectations? Were they trying a little too hard to tell themselves that they really had a good time?

Getting ready for that long drive back to Quebec. Packing everything away in the car. And then this cyclist flies by and screams, “Quebec!” but he says it like a non-Quebecer, like “Kwa-beck!” instead of the “Keh-bec” that, now that he’s writing it all out, much later in the day, he always imagines Quebecers to say it like that, the second way. And maybe that was it, they were like, “all right, let’s hit the road, we’ve got a long drive, we’ve got to get to a gas station so we can get some gas and some coffee and let’s head back to Canada.”

I don’t know. I hope they had a nice trip. I hope the coffee hit them just right. I hope they got to feel during their stay here as good as I felt this morning, even for just a moment, that joy I got to feel just for my own fleeting moment.

Just letting my mind wander a little

I get so bored sometimes. I’ve been staring at this computer screen for the better part of an hour just trying to think of something to write about. I don’t know where my ideas usually come from, but it’s just not happening today. I bought this ten dollar application for my computer called Freedom, and it totally blocks out the Internet for specified amount of time. I thought, this will be great, I won’t have any distractions, I’ll get all of my writing done a lot quicker.

But the writing isn’t coming out. And I don’t have anything to do now, because I shut off the Internet. And I planned it perfectly, so that it’s only going to come back on right as I have to leave for work. So I’m just sitting here at the kitchen table tapping my feet on the floor.

What else is there to do? Maybe the Internet’s not holding me back, maybe it allows my mind to wander, to stretch to an extent that I get creative. Maybe I’ll waste an hour clicking from link to link, but maybe that inspires some base part of the creative process. Or maybe I’m just going through Internet withdrawal right now and my brain is trying to come up with nonsense reasoning of why I should have never allowed myself to shut off the Internet in the first place.

I had three cups of coffee right before I sat down. So my leg’s tapping furiously against the chair, against the floor. I’ve gotten it to such a perfect pace that my entire thigh muscle is completely bouncing up and off the bone. It’s a weird feeling, and I can only keep it up for a little while before my foot starts sliding on the kitchen tile. I lose the rhythm, I have to pull my foot back and, try as I might, I can’t find those measured beats again.

Every day around two o’clock the sun starts pouring through the kitchen window, totally blinding me to the point where I can’t even see my computer screen. It’s been kind gloomy out lately, so I’ve gotten used to being able to sit down for an extended period of time without having to move across the room avoiding the sun’s direct rays. Now it’s just coming out sporadically.

Would you consider sporadic to be a big word? I try to avoid big words. Not because I don’t like them, or don’t understand them. Sure there are tons of big words that I don’t understand. I just feel like a lot of the time it’s a trick, a way to come across as intelligent without really being intelligent. There was this kid I worked with in high school, kind of a dick but whatever, when you’re in high school and you don’t have a car yet you kind of just hang out with whoever’s around. And I worked with this kid all the time.

And he always had a way of using unnecessarily long words in totally inappropriate situations. One time this kid made a joke to our boss, but it was a really shitty joke, and it didn’t get any sort of a reaction whatsoever. And so as my boss just stares at him, the kid says, “I was being facetious.” It looked like somebody was spending a little too much time prepping for the SATs.

Facetious. Give me a break. As I went through college, as I spent a lot of time writing and editing for our school’s newspaper, I found a bunch of words that people would use over and over again for the sake of sounding smart. Words that weren’t necessary, like facetious. You could just say that you were joking around. No, people liked to use facetious. Plethora. That’s another one. Copious. Whatever, they’re words, and so I guess you’re allowed to use them, but nobody talks like that in real life. It just sounds so contrived, or made up.

Sporadic. The only reason I feel like that’s an acceptable word is, one, because I already used it, and so I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite, but two, I learned it from the movie Clueless, where they’re all studying for the SATs. And they learn the word sporadic. And then the older brother says to that girl, “Be seeing you,” and she responds, “Hope not sporadically,” and they kind of wink at each other in that haha we just used the word we just learned about.

And the reason I remember this scene so well is because they played Clueless on HBO pretty much nonstop during the early 2000s. Whatever, if you didn’t have cable, or worse, if you had cable but no HBO, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. But if you had HBO, you know exactly what I’m talking about, and so, yeah, I think sporadic is totally appropriate. I’m not being facetious. I’m being super serial. (That’s not from Clueless, that’s from South Park.)

I haven’t seen my old friend Rich in forever

Rich? Is that you Rich? How long’s it been? Really? Oh, sorry, well, you look just like my friend, my old friend Rich. You’re not like his brother or cousin, are you? No, that’s a totally different last name. You ever do that? You ever walk up to somebody and think it’s somebody else? And now what are we supposed to do? Waiting in line like this, it’s kind of awkward, and I’m still talking. Can I call you Rich? How about, I’ll buy your cup of coffee if you pretend to be Rich for the rest of the time we’re standing here in line. Come on, it’ll be fun. Rich, come on, Richie. I never called him Richie. Well, maybe once in a while, if I was just talking for the sake of talking, I might be like, “Yo Richie!” but it was always just Rich. Or Dick. What’s up Dick? That was funny mostly when we were much younger, but, I don’t know, if you ask me, certain jokes never lose that zing, that certain whatever it is that makes you laugh so much. Dick. What a ridiculous nickname. You ever go by Dick? No, we’re still pretending here, you, pretending to be Rich. So in this scenario, where I just said, “You ever go by Dick?” you’d say, “No, never,” because I just told you that we never called Rich Dick. You ever go by Richie? No, act like you’re still pretending to be Richie. Come on, I’ll buy you one of those muffins. Jesus, this is a long line. You know Rich-O, it’s only going to feel longer, just standing here not talking to me, after we’ve already been through so much. Come on Rich, I’m starting to look like a crazy person here. Just give me something to go with, something, anything. Hey, you know what’ll be really fun? If when the guy asks you what your name is, so he can write on the side of the coffee cup, say Rich, and we’ll watch him write it down. Then I’ll get somebody else to take photo of us, me and you, standing side by side, smiling, and you’ll be holding the coffee cup towards the camera, so it clearly says Rich. Or even better, tell him that you’re name is Dick, and then we’ll take the same photo, and then I’ll send it to Richie, not you, the real Rich. I haven’t seen that guy in years. I’m sure he looks like what you look like right now. I mean, you’re everything that I’ve ever imagined Rich would look like at this age. I wonder if I still know anybody that would have his cell phone number. What am I saying? I can get that online, anything online. God, that’s going to be so funny, because he hated being called Dick, that’s why we never called him Dick, only like during really, really rare kind of in-the-moment type jokes. Like we’d be playing video games and we’d all get in an argument over who gets to play what and who’s next, and I’d say, “Stop being such a dick,” and that would be kind of funny, we’d go into the whole Richie, Dickie, man, that was fun. If I find him, would you ever want to get together? Me and the two Dicks. I’m just kidding. I’m just messing around. But that would be so funny if I set up a little reunion with Rich, and I tell him to meet up at a certain bar or whatever, but me and you, we’ll get there a little earlier, and when Richie walks in he’ll see us both talking, and I’ll do a fake double take, say something like, “Wait a second, if you’re Rich, who’s this clown?” and then you do some real evil laugh and run out of the bar. I won’t explain anything. That’ll mess him up good. That would be so funny. Come on man, we have to make this happen. Yeah, two coffees please, just write Dick on both of them. And a muffin. No, please, I insist. Well, whatever, one coffee, one latte, and a muffin. Just take the muffin. So what? Take it home. Eat it later. Hey, you’re writing Dick, write? This is going to be so funny. You know that a latte is mostly milk, right? I’m just saying. If you can handle that, that’s cool. I can’t. I don’t know if Richie can. We were all much younger, nobody drank coffee yet. No it’s cool, I’ll meet you over by the sugar. Yeah, for that picture. Come on, please you have to. Because, man it’s crazy, you look just like him! Just like my good friend Richie.

Running really late for work

Sometimes I feel like I’m always running late, regardless of when I have to be up, or how much time I have at my disposal to be ready. For example, the other day my boss asked me to work a double shift. “No way,” I told him, “I hate working.” OK, I didn’t say that exactly, but I still said no. Not taking no for an answer, he countered “OK fine,” he told me, “How about you can come in at noon?” And I was like, all right, fine, that sounds doable.

And I started planning out how the day would go. I’d wake up at eight-thirty, get like three blog posts done, take my dog Steve for a long walk, make a nice breakfast, maybe even get some reading done. Let’s do it!

The next thing I know my cell phone alarm clock is blaring at the periphery of my consciousness. I’m trying to get out of bed but my body is completely unresponsive. My cell phone alarm is so loud, so grating. I don’t know if everybody is familiar with the iPhone alarms, but I always use the one that sounds like the red alert from Star Trek. It’s intense. But it’s the only one that even stands a remote shot at waking me from a deep sleep.

What happened? Eleven o’clock already? Jesus. I usually wake up a lot earlier. I barely had time to get up, shower, shave, and then take the dog for a walk before I grabbed my bike and pedaled to work at a pace I usually reserve for outrunning taxis I’ve accidentally bumped into in traffic. OK, that’s not really true. I don’t outrun taxis. I just got a little carried away with the length and dramatics of that sentence. Although I did love Premium Rush.

But still, I was right on the verge of being late for a shift that I was already told to come in late for. I really was biking to work a lot faster than I usually do. For the first time in the better part of a year, I had left the house without so much as putting a morsel of food in my mouth. More importantly was coffee, or the lack thereof. Brewing and waiting and sipping, it was all completely out of the question.

I made it on the floor of the restaurant literally at the very minute. And I’m not one of those guys to throw around the word literally. Like I actually punched in and it said 12:00. I made it to work and the floor manager sees me and goes, “Finally! Rob’s here. Where have you been?” That deal that the general manager made with me? That whole thing about working a double and then telling me to come in at noon? Did we seal the deal some kind of a secret handshake? Because he didn’t tell anybody else. So I had to explain myself to the other managers, telling them I actually wasn’t late, but even when I hunted down the GM, “Right?” I asked him, “Remember you said I could come in at noon?” “Right …” he had that look on his face, like I might be making it all up, like he couldn’t really pinpoint the agreement I was talking about.

The day is over. I made it through. I just can’t get over the fact that, with two extra hours added to my day, I wound up being later than ever, later than I am on a regular day when I have to be at work at my regular time. I missed breakfast, I missed coffee, and I didn’t get to write anything. My whole day at work was thrown off balance. I was having what I assumed to be a lack of caffeine induced headache, even though normally I don’t believe in those. And I was starving. I was starving and serving people delicious, delicious lunch. It was torture.

When did I become so dependent on coffee? I never drank coffee in college. I don’t even remember when it became this habit. I honestly don’t know how I got to the point where I need three cups of coffee just to feel like myself in the morning. That’s kind of crazy, right? But tons of adults drink coffee. Maybe I’m more of an adult than I’m letting myself admit. You know, aside from the whole almost being late to work at noon thing.

Can I get some more coffee? A little more coffee, please?

There’s this diner right down the block from my place. I love it so much. I love diners in general. There’s nothing better than sitting down and being handed a menu as thick as a phonebook with absolutely every single dish in the world printed somewhere inside. I never even look at the menu, because I know that whatever I wind up wanting to order is going to be in there somewhere, and if it isn’t, someone behind the line will just make it for me anyway. Diners are the best because they’ll do anything you want and it’s never a big deal.

I love this diner, but I’m not sure if I like going there for breakfast. As soon as I get up every morning, I’m automatically starving. My first thought is always: what do I have to eat, and how long before I can start eating it? I get started on breakfast before I take a shower, before I brush my teeth. I’m just always really, really hungry. If I go to the diner, I have to get ready first, which means that my hunger is going to mount and get stronger and tug at the corners of my consciousness. I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone else, but if I let my hunger get past a certain point, it wins. It says to me, fine, you want to be hungry? You’re going to be hungry. And after I get past that point, there’s nothing I can do that will satisfy it for the whole day. I’ll keep eating, but I’ll still be hungry. Once every couple of years or so I’ll find myself either waiting in a waiting room or being stuck in a car in the middle of nowhere for like eight hours. It might not be exactly that situation, but it’ll be some sort of scenario where I’m starving and there is absolutely no way that I’ll be able to put any food in my mouth for an extended period of time. In this case, my hunger wins, but it doesn’t stop. It metastasizes into something cruel, something vicious, something that, when I finally do get myself in front of a plate of food, won’t even let me enjoy it. Do you know what I’m talking about? How sometimes you get so hungry that when you finally get to eat it actually hurts? It doesn’t feel good or satisfying at all. It’s like your stomach has started to feast on it’s own lining, and it’s all you can do to put something, anything back in there to stop your whole digestive system from self-destructing. And each bite you take you wish you could take out, but you know that you just have to pay your dues and take your lumps and try to remember to always keep a bag of something or a piece of bread or fruit in your pockets at all times, especially when you think you might be somewhere without access to a snack for a while.

It’s obviously not that extreme, getting ready to go to breakfast at the diner, it’s only like maybe an extra half hour to an hour, getting ready, getting out of the house, walking to the diner, waiting to get seated, waiting for the waitress to come over, waiting for the food to come out. But the same process that eventually ends in me not being able to enjoy my food begins somewhere in that time span. So even though I love the diner, and I love a diner breakfast, I’m not really sure how I feel about going to the diner for breakfast.

And then there’s the issue of coffee. I get up in the morning and I love to drink coffee. I make a giant pot and just sit there and drink it and eat my breakfast. Going to the diner, it’s like the coffee is this whole separate hit-or-miss process. On a best-case scenario, I’ll sit down at the table, and a busboy will come up to me right away, even before the waitress has a chance to say hi, and he’ll say, “Coffee?” nothing else, not “hello,” not, “Would you like some …” just “Coffee?” And I’ll just say, “Yes, please, thank you so much, coffee.” And he brings me over a cup of coffee. I can’t be alone in this. Maybe people like me have this look that people who work at diners have learned to recognize as an expression of anguish that can only be satisfied by the immediate serving of coffee. And diner coffee is the best. If I could choose one type of coffee to drink for the rest of my life, it would definitely be diner coffee. It’s always so fresh because they’re constantly serving pots and pots of it. It’s just the best.

But they bring it out in these tiny cups. It has to be a huge joke. I wish they just had a coffee machine installed at every table. Barring that, I wish they’d serve the coffee in a giant cup, a cup big enough to hold five or six cups of coffee. As soon as I’m served my first cup of coffee, I like to down it in one gulp, before the busboy even has a chance to walk away, and I want him to see this. I want him to see me pour this scalding cup of hot coffee down my throat, and I want him to know that it physically pains me to do this, but he’ll get it, he’ll get the message, that I really wanted that coffee, despite the pain, despite the burning, so go get the pot, fill me up, and keep it coming.

But that’s, like I said, a best-case scenario. A slightly less best-case scenario involves the waitress having to come over, asking me if I’m ready, and I say that I am, and I have to order my cup of coffee in the same sentence that I order my large glass of orange juice and my Greek omelet (I’m being hypothetical here. I never order the same thing for breakfast. A Greek omelet just happened to be the first thing that popped in my head. But I’m not being hypothetical about the OJ. That’s always the same. Well, maybe I’m being half-hypothetical, because every once in a while I’ll get a large half-OJ half-grapefruit juice. But that’s only if I get my coffee first, because I don’t want to overload the waitress with commands that might hinder the timely delivery of my coffee.) When everything’s ordered all together, it really deemphasizes how badly I’d like the coffee to come out first, to come out right this second, can you just send over the busboy maybe? Coffee?

Amidst all of these less-than-best-case scenarios, one time I had an cup of coffee at the diner on a busy Sunday morning, and I had moved the empty cup right to the edge of the table so anybody working in the restaurant could see that I needed some more. But my waitress wasn’t around. Finally another waitress came to the booth in front of me with the pot and started pouring, and I let out a sigh of relief, but I shouldn’t have let myself get too comfortable or too relaxed, because as I closed my eyes to let out that sigh of relief, she disappeared. So now I had to wait for my waitress to show up, and I had to kind of wave her down, which I never do, because I’m a waiter myself, and I really hate it when people flag me down, or worse, snap at me, or scream out, “Hello!” to get my attention, because can’t you see that I’m really busy? I’ll get to you in just a second! But I got her attention really quick and asked for just a little more coffee, please, I’m sorry to have flagged you down, I see that you’re really busy. And she says OK and disappears. And right as she fades out of my peripheral vision, I see the busboy from across the room, and he points to me and mouths the word, “Coffee?” and I’m thinking, oh shit, what do I say? If I say yes, then there’s definitely going to be a weird awkward moment where the waitress who I totally inappropriately begged to stop what she was doing to get me some more coffee will run into the busboy with another coffee pot, both of them clearly wasting their time on the same customer for just a cup of coffee in what’s obviously a very busy diner. She’ll think that I asked her for coffee, but then got so impatient that I also asked a busboy.

But, there’s no way that I could tell the busboy no because, and I know this from working at a restaurant, the minute I say no more, then I’m totally off of his coffee radar for the rest of the meal. He’ll think to himself, that guy’s done with coffee. He said no more coffee. And then I’ll have to constantly be waving down my waitress for the rest of the meal. They’ll hate me. So the busboy is waiting for me to answer, so I just kind of make this pained expression of my face and nod, “Yes, coffee.” And he goes to get the pot, and he gets it, but as he’s making his way back over here, just like I predicted, my waitress comes out of nowhere and fills my cup. And it’s super awkward.

I take a sip and the busboy appears again, not to be outdone by the waitress, and fills me up, even if it’s just a sip’s worth of coffee. I guess it wasn’t all that bad. I try to explain myself to the waitress but she’s as uninterested as humanly possible and not only that, she’s visibly annoyed. She drops off the check and it says, handwritten, “Please pay at the register!” and I’m thinking that this has to be a personal message, because every time I come in I always just leave it at the table, because that’s how we always did it at the diner by where I grew up, and it was never a big deal. And at the restaurant I work at now, there is no register, not for customers anyway, it’s just for the staff, so we just always just take the check and the money, you always pay the waiter there, and I always get so annoyed when a customer stands up with the check and looks for somewhere to pay that doesn’t exist, but now here I am, my cup of coffee, my check before I had a chance to ask for it, and I feel just as stupid, just as stupid as I imagine my customers to be when I’m looking at them wishing they would all just sit down and stop waving and wait for me to have a second and I’ll get to them next.