There’s a certain kind of boring person I find admirable—the kind with the confidence and consistency of character to put an insipid personality on full display without worrying about what others think. Some might see a lack of self-awareness in such a person. I see courage.
I was at a get-together once, for example, where a boring man I had just met began describing his morning coffee routine in excruciating detail. He prefers a more careful preparation than your average Mr. Coffee is capable of, you see, but the trouble is his chosen method takes more time and mornings are hectic. So he needed to devise a way to multitask. And he felt that a roomful of near-strangers would be interested in hearing the resolution to this conundrum for the ages.
He was profoundly wrong in that assumption, but I envied his total freedom from the pressure to amuse.
In the spirit of my boring hero, I would like to share with you my own morning coffee routine, but unfortunately there’s not much to tell. My husband, Frank, handles it.
He wakes up before I do, so before he leaves for work he measures out the grounds and pours the water into the coffeemaker’s tank. Then when I get around to starting my day (I work from home), I press the brew button and ta-da.
Frank does the grounds and the water for me not because I’m lazy but because I am incompetent. I never get the amount of grounds right and I nearly always spill water everywhere, so one day I asked Frank to do those tasks for me and he’s been doing them ever since. If Acts of Service were my love language I’d be in marital heaven.
My only noteworthy contribution to the coffee routine has been the little ceramic coffee scoop I bought for Frank at some hippie-dippie shop in Sedona, Arizona. The item is wholly unnecessary, seeing as how a spoon would get the job done just as well. But the scoop is tiny and made by hand and I knew Frank would love it and he does.
Receiving Gifts is his love language, so I suppose he’s in marital heaven.
The type of coffee we brew at home is Dunkin’ Original Blend. We live in Massachusetts, after all. I take it black. Frank puts Splenda in his, about which I am very judgmental.
I probably drink too much coffee, though I do try not to have any after lunch. Unless of course I get an afternoon iced coffee because the weather’s nice or because I need to delay starting a project or because I can think of any other excuse.
I guess I’d rank coffee pretty high on the list of what makes life worth living. It’s not up there with, like, laughter or music or orgasms. But coffee brings considerably more joy than a lot of other supposedly good things that, to quote Shania Twain, don’t impress-a me much.
If, for instance, I had to choose between a nice medium roast and, say, marijuana? Or Breaking Bad? Or Christmas?
Well, coffee, to quote Shania Twain, is still the one.
I wouldn’t yammer on about it at a party, though. I save that sort of thing for this blog, which, going by my site traffic numbers, basically amounts to keeping it to myself.
Indirect Objects 