Weighing Coffee Beans

I’m trying to work on developing some patience. I possess the kind of restlessness that is horrifyingly anxiety-inducing to everyone around me, and paired with being generally fidgety and future-oriented, we have the perfect marriage to produce a flustered and high-strung individual. If you’re thinking to yourself that both that sentence and these qualities sound unpleasant, you would be correct. I find them unpleasant too if it’s any consolation.

I like to walk almost everywhere rather than taking public transportation because I often can’t physically deal with sitting in a cab or on the train. It always feels like I could make more progress if I were just walking on my own accord, as if somehow I could propel myself down to the East Village more quickly than the 4 train ever would. Even when I go for long walks without any particular destination I speed past people on the sidewalk, side-stepping and muttering “excuse me”s under my breath. I find myself adopting that terribly over-described and not actually New York-specific mentality, getting annoyed when I have to slow down behind a family of four spread to the edges of the pavement. I had a man who walked me home from a date once tell me that he was struggling to keep up with my pace. He was 6'2".

My mother and I always make fun of my father because of how long he takes to sit down at the dinner table every night. His routine involves shuffling around the kitchen at an excruciatingly slow pace and placing food into the microwave over and over again until the center is warm and the edges of the plate are so hot that they could burn your fingerprints off. My mother and I will moan and groan when he decides he’d like to cut himself a slice of bread at the last minute. We beseech him to pick up the pace. We tell him we don’t understand how he gets anything done. He thinks it’s funny. And I get it. I mean, let the man have a piece of bread with his tomato soup for crying out loud.

My father’s demeanor is calm and reserved. He rarely raised his voice at me when I was a child. I’ve never seen him in a rush and my incongruence to his disposition makes me wonder where I get this impatience from. We’ve been making coffee at the same time every morning while working from home over the last year. I’ve been making a lot of shitty coffee. I haphazardly scoop six mounds of beans into our grinder and let everything boil in a french press for 4–6 minutes depending on the day. I then let it sit for a beat before pouring it over a mound of ice. The whole thing is disgusting. It gets diluted in minutes and tastes like the dirt you’d get in your mouth when playing soccer on a particularly windy day on Randall’s Island as a kid.

My father weighs his coffee beans every morning on a food scale that he’s diligently glued back together a few times (see? Patient.). He has handwritten the correct weight, water, and time ratios on a dusty index card that hangs on for dear life via scotch tape on our stove. He makes his coffee the night before and then sticks it into our elderly fridge so that he doesn’t have to supplement it with ice in the morning. Everything is very precise, and he often gently offers to make some for me too. I usually refuse and jokingly tell him to enjoy his superior beverage. I can tell he thinks it’s ridiculous. Why wouldn’t I just take the time to weigh the beans and brew everything ahead of time to guarantee myself a solid cup? I don’t have an answer to that.

I’m mentally speeding through the important stuff. I looked forward to graduating from college a year beforehand. I find waiting to go on a trip planned for two months away to be agonizing, and sitting at the gate even more insufferable. I’ve been known to get a little snappy at ex-boyfriends and flings who haven’t fed me in time. I look forward to the end of first dates, not because I’m not enjoying myself, but because I like the fact that I’ll know this person a bit better by the time we get the check, allowing me the clarity and relief to make some kind of decision about them. In this same way, I look forward to the end of our next few dates because I feel like I’ll be that much closer to understanding them and my wants. It’s as if no one ever told me that I don’t even have to decide anything if I don’t want to.

I don’t really know how to stop moving so quickly. The anticipation of moments and the unconscious need to shorten the space between them are forcing me into some bizarre whirlwind lifestyle that I don’t really want to be a part of. I’m not even sure where the need to rush comes from. It’s almost like I don’t know what to do myself when I actually have a moment to pause. Even when engaging in relaxing activities like reading, I become irate with myself when I don’t finish a book in a matter of days. I look at my father and think to myself that his heart must beat at half the speed of mine. I would love to know that kind of mellowness.

I guess this is all to say that I should really start weighing my coffee beans. I’d also like to allow myself a slice of bread even if it means everyone is waiting for me to commence their eating. I think half of it is knowing that they can wait. And I can wait. There are no real consequences to either.