My lovely wife of many years finally tired of me wasting our beloved Peet's Coffee.
She says I too often fail to finish the brewed coffee in my monster cup. I use super giant cups, fill them to the brim, and often leave as much as a third of it in the cup, when finished. I make the big cups, because I like a lot of coffee once a day and because I do not like the taste of warm-ups burned by the hot plate of my Bunn, or her Braun.
I used an insulated coffee caraffe and a small cup for five years once and then suddenly in a fit of existential rage, threw them both away, shook my fist at god, and said, "Fuck it, I'm sick of hassling with that caraffe and small cup. I'm sick of trying to be good and trying to brew just the right amount and keep it warm without using electricity. I want my coffee in one big cup, god. I don't want to have to go back to the coffee pot. I don't care if I don't drink it all. I don't care if I am wasting some, because it gets cold before I can finish it. I never asked you for MTV, or a threesome with Donna Summers and Stevie Nicks. I never asked for a Bertram 26' Sport Convertible II outboard. I never asked why you let so many awful things happen in this world. Is it too much to ask that you allow me to drink one enormous cup of impossibly good and black French Roast and waste a quarter to a third of it? Isn't it okay if I do this, now that I really understand I am going to die some day and that its not going to be any fun dying? Well, can't I without being damned to hell for eternity in Walmart's housewares section?
cont.
I never got an answer from the big cahuna in area code zero on this burning issue.
So: I just went ahead and started drinking my mega cups and feeling no guilt whatsoever about wasting the final quarter or third of the cup due to premature cooling.
But my wife decided that she would have to act in the wake of god's refusal to comment on the record.
As she and I have been married many wonderful years, she has, as veteran spouses often do, contemplated stabbing me to death in the night as I sleep for what others might simply view as a modest wastefulness hardly worth noting.
She said recently that if she found another one of my mega cups with precious Peet's dregs undrunk, she might drive her car through the wall of my home office, jump out with an assault rifle, and riddle me with a clip full of hand-hollowed dumb-dumb slugs and feed my remains to the first stray dog that wandered by. Love manifests in mysterious ways sometimes.
Anyway, once she came to her senses and decided against offing me with such extreme prejudice, she did what any person would have done. She sought a technical solution.
She bought me a cup warmer from Brookstone and gave it to me as a Christmas stocking stuffer along with cyanide capsules and estate bottled hemlock.
This Brookstone coffee warmer is exactly the kind of gadgetry that we both abhor. Every person I ever saw with a cup warmer I looked down my nose at. She once even unplugged and hid one used by an employee in her office, only to be so wracked by guilt that she retrieved it, cleaned it up, and replaced it on the bewildered employee's desk. I would even go so far as to say that I loathed these cup warming gadgets. It did not matter how they looked. The only place a coffee cup warmer could possibly have been appropo was in one of the inner most rings of hell in Dante's Inferno. Satan, I suspected, would use one in Paradise Lost, were Milton writing epic similies today. During the darkest, most lawless days of the Bush Administration, which was to say ALL of the days of the Bush Administration, I just knew that George Bush, between binges of falling off the Jim Beam wagon, kept his instant Yuban warm on a cup warmer.
But here I sit, as I type, looking at and loving my marvelous little Brookstone coffee cup warmer with a high and low temperature setting. It is round. It is black with brushed metal ring. It holds my "empty" cup from this morning.
All is right, except for the nagging guilt of this pleasure.
Even my wife has ceased cleaning her AK-47.
Happy holidays to all. It looks like I'm going to be allowed to live to see one more New Years Eve afterall.
Post Script: Here's a picture of it. Of course I don't use one of those puny cups. I use a cup that looks more like this one.
Mostly because
Dr Wilson spelled "wracked" correctly, I am encourage to respond. (See what a blessing that can be ?) (Crossed eye emoticon here) (Now, about apropos. . .)
Let me understand: the extra-large cup was used because the extra volume of coffee tended to keep the cup warmer longer, or at least until a satisfactory amount of beverage had been consumed ? Or was it just unnecessary overkill ?
I don't make coffee at home, so am dependent on one of several local coffee shops for my morning brew. A sorry trend seems to be to serve the larger sizes in a "tureen" without handle. Most peculiar. Is this a European custom ?
Give me a moderately large bowl-shaped cup with a one-finger handle, or a generous mug like the one above, over anything else.
Why not find a large...
Why not find a large insulated mug with a lid? Must the solution reside in gadgetry? Are gadgets the best solution for those little conundrums? In this case, is it practical, from resource extraction all the way down the line to plugging into the wall outlet, using electricity, to warm a cup of joe?
I'm not scolding you, after all this is guilty pleasure we're talking about.
My guilty design pleasure...is a birthday gift recently given to me. Wholly unnecessary, but comes in handy trimming sideburns or rouge follicles. Better having one tool than 3-4 separate task specific gadgets.
Gadget minimalism?
Comfort furniture
My guilty design pleasure... My sister's home is a bourgeois house full of overstuffed furniture, giant TVs and huge beds with mattresses so soft I sink into them. It's excess, a monument to Wal-Mart abundance. And I find it so comfortable. The aesthetics are contrary to the minimalism I love--but often I'd rather lie on her absurdly comfy sofa and watch a movie than my clean-lined mid-century settee.
So, that's my guilty pleasure. I think her home is the design equivalent of comfort food.
"Wracked?"
dcwilson and SDR:
Your intelligence, erudition, and courtesy have long impressed me, so I'm reluctant to suggest that you may be over-thinking an idiom. But, at the risk of appearing pedantic, I must point out that you are, more likely, RACKED by guilt. "Wrack" refers to shipwreck; "rack" evokes discomfort comparable to that suffered on the rack, an instrument of torture. A quick dip into the OED will confirm this.
In any case, here's to a less tortured new year for all.
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/refpages/RefMedia.aspx?refid=1481565833&ar...
I'm all for anyone risking...
I'm all for anyone risking to appear pedantic, so I'll weigh in to say that either wracked or racked might be ok in this instance.
http://www.bartleby.com/68/53/4953.html
Woof Woof...
Your gift gives me an idea.
How about a razor on one end and tooth brush on the other!
Maybe even cruciform with a different personal appliance on each end. Razor. Trimmer. Toothbrush. Nose hair trimmer.
Pick up one device and just keep turning it until I am ready to meet the day.
Swatch, are you listening.
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