the elixir of vitality

"Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and as sweet as love."
--Turkish Proverb

I am a curious adopter of fashion. I confound easy labels like 'early adopter' by coming to some things too late and other things too early. Like how I waited all summer to see Jurassic Park when it came out. I guess I could make the facile statement about the difficulty of change, but really change is such a constant force that I feel we should complain less about change in itself when really what we are complaining about is the rate at which change is occuring. That, to me, is more valid, although it still skirts the issue of context, namely that change is not an unmitigated good or evil.

Thus while we fear disruption of our daily routine, an opportunity to speed its progress will not be rejected based on it being an alteration. I bring this up because of an experience with one of my favorite possessions: the Philips Senseo coffeemaker, which brews single cups of coffee from prepackaged filter 'pods'. Truly the life of a graduate student is incomplete without such a device. However, academic life has never been known as a profitable gig, and many grad students like myself resent paying extra for coffee we could grind ourselves just because it has been fitted into a filter. The ability to make plastic replacement pods is thus a boon to commerce and the environment. And plsu now I can make Blue Mountain or Sulawesi in my Senseo, rather than if I relied on the podmakers to serve up such exotica.

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