I'm always amazed by how quickly my thoughts turn to coffee in the morning. It's usually the first thing I do once the girls and the fats have calmed down enough for me to think straight (actually, it's always the first thing I do. Come downstairs, scoff at how ridiculous dogs can be before 5 am, and then turn on the stove.) It's an addiction, a need. I'd like to say it's all in the ritual, but to be honest I'm positive that it's only 25% ritual and 75% addiction.
I'm not a nice person without coffee. I used to be. I swear that I used to be. But somewhere in the past 5 or 6 years I got addicted. I blame it partially on my work and 2 boyfriends, but also on France. I don't mean the country, but I kind of do.
When I was younger I spent a good bit of time "en france" ("in france", if it's too early for snobbery) at different times, although it's been far, far too long for me to claim any sort of fluency or accuracy with my foreign language skills. Don't get me wrong, I can still string together a pretty good set of expletives. You know, should some scary, tween street gang dressed in purple berets and armed with cigarettes come at me in the middle of the street with song and dance demanding my brooch, or a light.
But that's beside the point. At the end of my stay in France I was living with a woman, aptly named, France, and 3 of her 4 children. The closest to my age was Ange. A wonderfully vibrant 15-year-old french girl with so much tenacity I didn't know what to do with myself. She would flit around the apartment at all hours of the day or night, listening to classical music mashed up with weezer songs and dragging me out of the apartment to go to farm parties (I'll explain later). To this day, I haven't been able to find that music OR someone quite as vivacious as Ange was.
As graceful as Ange was jubilant, France was what we americans would consider "typically french." She was beautiful, confident, smart, well-dressed and didn't put up with anyone's shit. Monday through friday she drilled me with verbs, conjugations, nouns from a seat across the kitchen table, her hair perfectly coiffed and draping over her striped sweaters. As far as she was concerned, the french I'd been brought up with in the south of France was nowhere NEAR the level of sophistication required of her apartment dwellers (She's from Paris. I wish that this didn't "explain it" but she grew up in one of those hoity toity french neighborhoods with maids, doormen, dogwalkers, grocery shoppers and butt-wipers.).
Haughty or not, I loved her. I would spend my days at school learning NOTHING because not only was I a year behind due to a minor language barrier, but I had studied everything they study in Highschool before arriving --I'm an overacheiver, but that's another story all together. And when I would make it back to the apartment, I'd run to see what France was up to while Ange set to her homework after scoffing and thoroughly rolling her eyes at how strangely attached to her "uncool" mother I'd become.
And this, several somewhat useless paragraphs later, is where my addiction to coffee began. France would greet me, tell me to have a seat, then step into the kitchen to grab her ready-to-go french press and some perfectly warmed water from a teakettle. She would pour the water while talking to me and so our afternoon began. It sounds ridiculous, but she talked. I listened and watched. She had perfected, and I do mean perfected, the art of french press coffee.
I'm still working on it a decade later. After pouring the water we chatted about things I hadn't understood at school, like chemistry and certain things the fellas would say to me, when suddenly, as if by some sorcery, she turned to the coffee after about 4 minutes to press the plunger as if she was a marionette. I'm still not sure she even knew she was doing it.
I'd say I have two big regrets from my year in France at 16. One of which we'll discuss later... (ok, fine. A boy named Julien. He was adorable, and enamored of me --even if it was my shiny, crass, crazy american-ness. But I chose to ignore him. Dance with him once, but ignore him in the end. It's a longer story than that. Maybe more later) But my second greatest regret is that I never asked France just how the HELL she made coffee so perfectly without even pausing to think about it. How on EARTH can someone make a drink that can so easily go awry without any expended effort?! The only viable option I can think of is that she was magic. Or a vampire.
Anyway, Long story short. I've been working on my French Press skills for a while. And just when I think I've got the timing engrained into my brain, I'll stop using a timer. You know what happens?
It turns out GROSS. That's what happens. Somehow my hopes that France is somewhere deep in my soul, just itching to let her grace slip out, are squashed by my completely american inability to focus on any one given task. Suddenly four minutes turns into ten and my efforts are shot to hell. Why? Cause I've been multi-dabbling again.
So, for the time being. I'm sticking to timers.
