Talk Thursday: Coffee!!

Let me just take a moment to say that TALK THURSDAY IS BACK!! WHOO HOO!! HAPPY DANCE!! CELE IS AWESOME!! YAY!!

That over, it is time to consider the cultural and ideological ramifications of coffee. You may not know this, but coffee has a long and dark history of price fixing, exploitation of native peoples, land grabbing, clear cutting, and other things that are bad for human beings, bad for the environment, bad for the rain forests, bad for democracy and just generally bad all the way around. You think the mere eating of meat has bad side effects? Or the snorting of cocaine? My friend, you don't know from bad until you consider coffee. In fact, coffee has such a bad side to it that a real environmentalist, a true defender of the planet, an honest hater of slavery and exploitative labor practices would simply cast it aside, never to drink it again, before contributing another dime to the ghastly underworld that produces this bitter brown liquid.

Luckily, I'm neither a real environmentalist nor a true defender of the planet. What I am is a solid four-cups-a-day adventurer, to put a not-too-fine point upon it. Once upon a camping trip (yes, I have been known to go camping, though it's generally of the lodge-in-the-woods variety), one of my jolly fellow travelers couldn't find the coffee and suggested we take this weekend to break our caffeine addiction. I told her I liked my caffeine addiction just fine and I was going into town for a Starbucks, back in 45 minutes. (Six other women placed orders.) Because, seriously, I may be a Buddhist but I grew up in a Lutheran household. Anyone who did, knows that Scandinavian blood does not start to flow in the morning until it's at least 0.05 caffeine. Until then, it's best to stay out of the way, unless you happen to have some vinarterta handy (Vikings can be appeased temporarily with sugar).

Though it's hard to remember the time B.S. (Before Starbucks), there in fact was such a time, and during said time, a Brazilian exchange student lived at my place for a year. I was fifteen and she had coffee. Not American coffee, mind. American coffee was far too weak, so she had her parents mail her bags of Brazilian coffee which she ground herself. This coffee was amazingly strong. I mean, a spoon would stand by itself in a cup. In fact, I think a couple of spoons may have dissolved. One day, out of sheer curiosity, I poured a small amount in a cup and added enough cream to choke a horse, along with a ton of sugar (I mean, this stuff was dark). I stirred it and took a very, very cautious sip.

I remember the rush. My brain launched out of my skull, like a rocket, and flew skyward. I remember wondering why anyone bothered with cocaine when this stuff was cheap and legal. I also remembered wondering if I wasn't maybe a little young for this sort of thing. Then I chugged the rest of it (it wasn't very warm, what with all the cream) and poured myself another cup. That was it. I was hooked. Only one other time did I taste coffee this strong, and that was at a Viet Namese restaurant in San Diego, California. Not only was it almost solid, it was also combined with sweetened condensed milk. I was bouncing off the walls for twelve hours. Seriously, cheap and legal. Think about it.

If not for coffee, I'm reasonably sure I never would have finished high school, and I'm also reasonably sure I never would have made it through college. In college I began having interesting fits of sleeplessness (okay, let's call a spade a shovel; manic episodes) in which I'd not sleep for sometimes three or four days. I'd still be tired in the morning, though, which is where a new restaurant near the university, called the Coffee Plantation, came in. On those mornings I'd stop in and get a double espresso with a shot of chocolate syrup. This ensured that I would not only be tired, but tired and jumpy, a great way to manage Russian 101 and the finer points of my Victorian literature seminar. In its later years, the Coffee Plantation deteriorated from a necessary student stop-in to a student meat market and finally a would-be-artist hangout before nose-diving out of existence in the wake of the Starbucks boat, finally sailing in from the Pacific Northwest. Before it died, my best friend Kevin pounded a stake into its heart by dubbing it the Coffee Pretension. It expired of ruffled dignity before the market struck the final blow.

In closing, let me finally say that there are plenty of ways to mess up a pot of coffee, but coffee is like pizza is like sex is like an airplane book: Even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. (The Strain might be the unfortunate exception.) It took Joan almost 15 years of living with me, but she now drinks the stuff, too. Which just goes to show something or other. Cheers, all, I'm off to Starbucks.

Talk Thursday: Way Safe?

Well, kids, Ramadan has started. I know I should not complain; I don't have to fast between sunup and sundown every day for a month. But I do have to abstain from the World's Greatest Pita Bread for thirty days, which is plenty bad enough when you're as hooked on it as I am. That is, unless I can talk someone into coming with me to the nightly Iftar bash at Afrah. Afrah closes after lunch and then reopens at sunset, where they put on an Iftar spread that's supposed to rival the palace of the Sultan Himself. I've always wanted to go, but I've hung back for two reasons: 1. I haven't been fasting all day, so I'm not sure I could do it justice, and 2. It's kind of not my party. I mean, I'm deeply indebted to the Muslim community of Richardson for letting me hang around on the periphery, listen to their Arabic and their wild pop music, and eat their unbelievably wonderful food, but I kind of think crashing their party would be pushing it. It wouldn't be, you know, safe.

I don't mean safe in the physical-danger sort of way; Afrah is about the safest place you could possibly hang out. Besides the clientele, which is mostly couples and young families with children, the restaurant is right across the street from the Richardson police station. I'll bet they never get robbed. I mean safe in the I-don't-want-people-to-stare-at-me sort of way. I am sort of an outsider; I don't look terribly Middle Eastern, I don't wear a hijab and if you didn't know I could be counted on to be there, snarfing down baba ganouj, every Thursday from six to seven, you'd probably wonder what in the heck I was doing there.

Safety is an odd concept to someone who basically grew up without it. That I even know to look for it from time to time surprises me. I somehow missed all the lessons about the things a woman needs to do to stay safe; I don't understand that there are certain parts of town I should never venture into, for example, or that I shouldn't go out by myself at night. Don't know how I missed 'em, but I did. They must have been right after the lessons about how to put on pantyhose and how to combine a hair flip with giggle for maximum attractiveness to the male sex in an alcoholic watering hole, because I never got those either. This whole being female thing is a mystery to me.

Also, the things I expected to be safe never were. School, for example, was not safe. I know I'm not alone in that one; school wasn't safe for a lot of people. But all the Dick and Jane books sure led us to expect that school would be the one place where all our peers would be on our best behavior and nobody would get hurt and everybody would be friendly to everybody else. (Pause here for hysterical laughter.) Church wasn't a whole lot better; between the same kids I spent hours trying to avoid at school and some old white dude in the sky threatening to fry me alive with lightning bolts, it was actually worse in some ways. And home? Uh, forget home. Home is probably the most dangerous place on earth for a ridiculously high number of kids. You'll notice hardly any kid ever gets beaten up or sexually abused or kidnapped or locked in a closet by a complete stranger. No, it's usually mom and dad, and they usually get away with it unless, as sometimes happens, the kid dies.

So you'll forgive me for thinking this world we live in is maybe not terribly safe. I took karate lessons for about three years there, with this idea that at least I'd be prepared when whatever-it-is came at me. Unfortunately, karate wasn't terribly safe either, and I eventually had to quit because I was getting too close to brown belt and I didn't, uh, look the part. (Seriously, whoever heard of a fat karate instructor? That would be like Mr. Miyagi on steroids or something. Crazy.) I could probably still give whatever-it-is a run for its money, though. And stomp on it a few times.

Anyway. For the next thirty-ish days, I'll be having my Thursday night dinners at La Madeleine, where I'm currently munching on an overpriced shrimp salad (oh, excuse me, a salade) and wondering if there's somewhere besides La Madeleine and Hooters that has free wi-fi. Starbucks, maybe, but Starbucks is definitely not safe. They sell frosted scones at Starbucks. That's like the end of the world, worse than doughnuts.

Talk Thursday: Resurrection

When this topic first floated across my email, a song popped into my head. One of those old hymns from Bible camp; “I am the Resurrection/And the life/Those who believe in me will never die.” Not the world’s greatest Bible camp song, though it involved a lot of clapping. This being Easter Week and all that (yes, we Buddhists keep track of the Christian holidays; it’s hard not to when you live in frick’n Texas), it’s wholly appropriate to be talking about this coming back from the dead thing—even if it calls to mind, as it does for me, those creepy-crawly guys that growl and hiss their way through The Walking Dead on AMC. (Seriously. Jesus. Zombies. There’s a connection. It gets creepy if you think about it for too long.)

For some reason, resurrection has become the subject of arguments. When I was in college, some Christian organization was showing a movie about a guy who set out to prove the Resurrection never happened. If Christ never came back from the dead, as the story goes, then obviously all of Christianity was a fraud, and the entire Church would cease to exist. (The tag line: “Can your faith survive?”) I’ll admit I never saw the film, but I thought the premise was a little flawed. I know this will come as a news flash to some of you, but disproving something has never done much of anything to change anybody’s mind about anything religious. Every now and then some guy (it’s almost always a guy) announces that the day of judgment will be, say, next Tuesday at four o’clock, and when it doesn’t happen, his flock doesn’t exactly get up and leave him. If anything, they believe in him even more, because he’s singlehandedly staved off the Apocalypse. (Okay, sometimes they commit mass suicide instead. But nobody’s perfect.)

Sometimes I take in one of those Shroud of Turin shows on NatGeo or the History Channel. The shroud, in case you did not know this, is a piece of cloth with a radiographic image of a guy who looks remarkably like Jesus. Supposedly the image was made as His body dissolved into light, which is pretty interesting because, uh, you can only see the image with a radiograph. So as He was dissolving into light He had to predict that many years in the future, somebody would invent radiography, and then they’d be able to see that he’d dissolved into light, which is kind of an obscure thing to be thinking about at the moment you’re going from the state of being human to the state of being divine, if you ask me. But hey, he’s Jesus, right? He can do whatever He wants, right? So, yeah, he could commune with his divine state and dissolve into light and think about radiography all at the same time. I mean, why not.

So do Buddhists believe in resurrection of the body and life everlasting? I dunno. Go ask a Buddhist. Just kidding. Seriously, though, let me channel my inner Brother ChiSing here and say that Buddhists believe it does not matter if there is resurrection of the body and life everlasting. What’s important is living mindfully and graciously in this life. After all, this life is the one we have. There’s no reason to speculate about a life we don’t have. Anyway, if this is the only life we have, we would want to live it as mindfully and graciously as possible. And, if there is resurrection of the body, we would want to live this life as mindfully and graciously as possible, so as to be resurrected in a blessed state and have a better chance to be of use to more people following the resurrection.

What, you were expecting something profound? We haven’t even settled the question of reincarnation yet. Ask ten different Buddhists how reincarnation works and you’ll get twenty answers and forty deep discussions. And that’s just if you ask them today. Ask them again tomorrow and you’ll get twenty entirely different answers. Ask them before they’ve had their coffee and—no, don’t do that. That could get ugly.

What do I think about the resurrection of the body? That’s easy. Gross and no thank you. Reincarnation I can handle; Nature is a very efficient recycler. Besides, I’m planning to be cremated and made into plant food. This Jesus guy better be pretty good if He’s going to try to reconstitute me from ashes, soil and a big ol’ live oak. I’m just sayin’.

Happy Easter, everybody!!

Talk Thursday (on Sunday): I Mind /I Don't Mind

Yet another week with two Talk Thursday posts. I'm telling you, this'll lead to the end of the world before the collective Mayan subculture can yell "December 21, 2012". But do I mind? No, I don't mind. Two chances to shoot my mouth off about nothing in particular is better than none. Besides, I'm not sure there really is a collective Mayan subculture, or if that's just a myth that periodically circulates in the colonias of San Sebastian. Remind me to ask somebody next time I'm down there.

Anyway: I mind a cat stomping on my stomach at six in the morning on a Sunday and demanding food. I don't, however, mind the same cat doing the same thing on a Monday, because if I'm not up by then I'm running very late indeed and should be thankful as hell to be waked up at all.

I mind cold swimming pool water for the first forty-five seconds after I jump into it. After that, though, I don't mind, because when swimming as hard as I'm known to do on a typical morning, the last thing I want to be in is water that's too darn warm.

I mind doing laundry and hauling wet sheets out of the washing machine into the dryer. I don't mind hauling the same sheets, dry and sweet-smelling, out of the dryer to be folded up and trekked back upstairs to be applied topically to a waiting mattress. Why I find one chore so annoying and the other one so not-annoying, I haven't the foggiest idea.

I mind grocery shopping. In fact, I mind it with a passion. When Joan had her hysterectomy and couldn't drive for six weeks, we damn near starved to death because I did. Not. Want. To Go. To. The grocery store. Dammit. But I don't mind making a list, checking it twice, and preparing the food once it shows up. Figure that one out. I certainly haven't.

I mind traffic, and I mind being stuck in it. I particularly mind being stuck in traffic for no apparent reason, i.e., we finally start moving and we never pass the scene of an accident. I don't mind getting off the freeway and winding my way down surface streets to get where I'm going. That's the job of an urban explorer, a.k.a me.

I mind running out of scented shower gel before I run out of matching scented lotion. I don't at all mind shopping for more at Bath & Body Works, home of the official nose party.

I mind that in a desperate attempt to keep people from getting high, those in authority think they need to ban new substances every time I turn around, such as bath salts. For God's sake nobody tell them that kids in my high school used to smoke coffee grounds. I don't mind that somebody in my nabe smokes pot in his back yard on a regular basis, though someone in authority might. (I do mind, a little, that the stuff makes me sneeze, even far distant as it is.)

Interesting to note that the parts I mind, as well as the parts I don't mind, are largely a matter of perspective. Move two feet to the right and look at it again and you might not mind at all. The basic existence of something, like a cup of coffee, doesn't change whether you like coffee or hate it. (I happen to love coffee.) To ascribe hateful or likeable aspects to something is a uniquely human characteristic. The cup of coffee probably has no feelings whatever on the subject. It's neutral. It's Switzerland. It just is, and if we could remember that about more things more often, we might have an easier time with life in general.

That enough for one night? Yeah, probably. But because I went to a horror movie and lived to tell the tale, let's close this one out with a Friday Fright (on Sunday): I saw Paranormal Activity 2 at the local dollar theater this afternoon. (By the way, the dollar theater's gone up to $1.25. Inflation. ) If you saw the original, you might wonder how exactly the critter that was haunting the house in San Diego got to the house in San Diego to start haunting it. You might also wonder what happened to the slightly crazed heroine after she disappeared at the end of the movie. Both these questions get answered in PA2 in a really clever way that I won't go into here, tying the two films together in a neat package that pretty much kills any possibility of a PA3. But I've said stuff like that before and been wrong. There are scares aplenty, most of them loud and startle-y, and a couple of them involve a pool cleaner (don't ask). Three stars. Jen says check it out. Joan says, no, don't, things will jump out at you and scare you fuckless. Both of us are essentially right. You have been warned.

Of Which I Speak

Playing on the iPod: "Clubbing on Sunshine" by Svenson, from the Trance Box set
Meters swum today: 1900

"Winter solitude. In a world of one color, the sound of wind." --Basho

There's been a minor kerfuffle at work because the city school district has just announced all students will be required to learn Spanish. I'm the only one who seems to think this is a fine idea, and indeed a little surprised that they had to make it mandatory. I went to elementary school in Utah, fergodsake, about as far from any border as one can hope to get, and we had to take a foreign language--though there were several options, not just Spanish. Anyway, some people are very upset that kids are being required to take a foreign language at all, some that it's Spanish instead of a language spoken by a much cooler class of people (like, I dunno, Latin?) and some just have a problem with the whole "mandatory" business.

Yes, folks, some of my colleagues were born middle finger first. Well, so was I. So was Natalie Maines, for that matter--"Time" magazine even said so--but I don't think she'd object to learning Spanish. Anyway, discussing this over dinner with my common-law Significant Sweetie (12 years in April!) it suddenly occurred to me that all these various viewpoints about learning a language have nothing to do with the actual situation. As in, Colleague X can dislike the policy because Colleague X doesn't like Spanish; Colleague Y doesn't like the idea of kids learning any language other than English (yes, colleague Y is a xenophobic clod, but we'll deal with that in another post) and Colleague Z just hates being told what to do. Floating around by itself, unattached to any of these things, is the policy itself. It simply is what it is. People bring their emotions, angst, "issues," heat, etc. of their own choice. How somebody feels about a given item doesn't change the essential reality of that item.

I think most things are like that. Here's a cup of coffee. I love coffee. Some people hate coffee. Does the cup of coffee, itself, care whether you like it or hate it? Does your like or dislike for this cup of coffee change it substantially? I think not. A cup of coffee is a cup of coffee is a cup of coffee, until it's drunk (preferably with cream and sugar). This would apply to practically everything, from microorganisms to Hillary Clinton. I wonder what amazing things we'd see in the world if we could simply look at something, just the way it is, without heaping all these preconceived notions on top of it. Half the time we can't see the coffee for the color of the mug, the forest for the trees, the person underneath the thick layers of "I don't like you because you're different." Seems like we make things a lot more unpleasant than they have to be, deciding we dislike things that aren't even there.

That said, I'm going to get another cup of coffee.