Just Me and 500 of My Favorite Morning Beverages...

[Written in the style of a young adult novel.]

Ding-dong.

The doorbell snapped me from a reverie of writing keyword-rich online content intended solely to satisfy the insatiable spiders created by search engines. I turned briskly from my standing desk and hurried to the door. As I fumbled with the knob, the bell rang again, twice. Ding-dong, ding-dong. I scampered down the dusty front stairs.

"Package for Brenna," said the delivery man. I signed for it.

I'm Brenna, as you probably guessed. And I had a pretty good idea what was in the box, seeing as I'd ordered it from the Internet about a week before. I bounded back upstairs and dropped the package on the kitchen table, then sliced it open with a steak knife.

If my life were a movie, a golden light would have glowed on my face from the open box, while a heavenly chorus sounded in the background. Unfortunately, I'm just a freelance writer who lives in Chicago. But what did shine in my face was green tea. Five-hundred bags of it, to be precise.

I felt the grin spread over my face like a bout of impetigo through a preschool. At last. The days of jittery java gulping were over. I turned to the camera for a closeup.

Hiiiiiiii, Mooooooommmm.

The Truth about Coffee.

Now that we're settling into our new apartment, children, I decided it was time to buy a coffee pot. Ours broke during our last few weeks in Carbondale, and it seemed silly to replace it before the big move. So I ventured out into the world and came home with this little beauty.

It is fittingly called a "Chefmate." As someone who considers herself a chef (or at least a cook (or at least a cooker)), it's nice to feel as if I have a "mate" around to pick up the slack and take care of all the chores I don't feel like doing. Although I must say, if the kitchen appliances mutiny, I can definitely see this guy being the one to toss me overboard.

Fortuitously, I recently had another revelation about coffee that was made possible only by the grace of technology and the genius of Mark Zuckerberg. You see, despite living with my mother (your grandmother) for years and observing her carefully every morning, I never quite knew how she felt about coffee.

Until now.

Turns out she's "interested."

Thank you, Facebook. The mystery is over.

The Future Is Here (Well, Not "Here" Here, But in This General Vicinity).

You know that feeling when it's mid-afternoon and you need a pick-me-up but brewing an entire pot of coffee would be tedious and wasteful because it's almost impossible to make just one cup*?

Well it turns out that there's a new invention that mainstream people have known about for months. It's called a "Keurig," which is the German word for "Good luck pronouncing," and it makes only ONE cup of coffee at a time. No leftovers, no wasted grounds.

Only wasted plastic containers that you throw in the trashcan, because who cares about the planet?!

*Hopefully you answered "no" to this question. You are far too young to be drinking coffee.

Lessons from Unexpected Places.

As you know from being raised by liberal poet hippies, the world is the best classroom of all. In order to get the most benefit out of the lessons your world is trying to teach you, it is important to keep your mind wide open and your eyes... wide open. Not very elegant, but there it is.

To show you what I mean by this, I'll show you some unexpected lessons I've learned in recent weeks, thanks to my strict open-mind/open-eye policies.

Lesson #1: Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

While this lesson didn't come from the more subtle and/or natural sources that poets generally prefer (e.g. a meadow full of butterflies and daisies), it still hit me with its profundity. And as a bonus lesson, I got to learn how to say "kitchen" in Chinese!


Lesson #2: Ignoring that pain in your foot will only lead to a stress fracture.


And that's not going to win you any fashion contests. Instead of pretending everything's okay while you continue to run for eight months, why not go to a doctor? It might save you a lot of velcro-boot-wearing down the road.

Lesson #3: Some pancakes take longer to cook than others--but they still taste just as delicious when they're done.


You might think this is a lesson about patience or even about puberty, but really it's just about how to time the wake-up call you send up to your father and me when you're preparing our breakfast on weekends. Because frankly, we don't want to get out of bed until the pancakes are done. Period.

Lesson#4: When you find an establishment that seems to be named after the male version of yourself and serves one of your favorite beverages, go inside. You won't be disappointed.