grief stage 0.1: writing product reviews online?
A few things happened last week. My sister bought me an awesome coffee maker for my birthday, and a good friend of mine died suddenly.
Grieving is weird, because my brain thinks it’s totally okay to mention these things in the same sentence. Sample conversation from the past five days:
Person: “Hey, how’s it going?”
Me: “Not great. My friend Sherwin dropped dead of a heart attack three weeks shy of his 41st birthday while he was on vacation in North Carolina.”
Person [stunned]: “Oh… oh my god. I’m so sorry.”
Me: “But in sunnier news, I have a drip coffee maker again, so things are really looking up.”
Also me: [bursts into tears, excuses self to the bathroom]
I wrote a tribute to my friend on social media, and I shared an old photo of us drinking wine at another friend’s birthday party eons ago, and I went to a small gathering of his closest friends and sat there emotionless until the eons-ago birthday-having friend came up to me, squeezed me, and whispered in my ear, tearfully, “I miss him SO MUCH,” at which point I started choke-sobbing. But there’s not much else I can do. I can be there for our mutual friends as we all try to make sense of it and carry on with our lives and honor his memory, but that’s all sort of nebulous, or at least it feels that way.
In the meantime, as an actual physical actionable task, I can make coffee. I mean, I suppose this is just part of carrying on, establishing comfort through routine (but I HATE routine! I love POUTINE, however), that sort of thing. Or maybe the right word is RITUAL. We now return to my emotionless waves of denial. Please enjoy the ride as I tell you about the Zojirushi Zutto 5-Cup Coffee Maker, available at Crate & Barrel for $69.99 (lol), suggested retail price $85 (this is bullshit, like Korean restaurants always claiming that their entrees are ON SALE, as though they are ever NOT the advertised price in red).
I just realized this is starting to read like one of those online recipe sites that people love to argue about, where the ingredients and instructions are buried below the musings of the chef. Fuck it. Pivot!
In “Greatest Reviews of All Time,” see also: Steering Wheel Laptop Desk; Sugar-free Haribo gummi bears
HOW TO MAKE COFFEE IN THE ZOJIRUSHI ZUTTO 5-CUP COFFEE MAKER, as explained by some of the reviewers on the Crate & Barrel website:
Complain about the size of the coffee maker. “This doesn’t make five 8-ounce cups!” As though ANY COFFEE MAKER EVER has actually advertised its size in 8-ounce cups. Do you realize how big the glass carafe would have to be on a 12-cup coffee maker if it actually produced 96 ounces of coffee? Does anyone besides Dave Grohl actually want to drink 96 ounces of coffee?
Complain about the quality of the coffee produced. “I used pre-ground grocery store off-brand or Maxwell House coffee and I put in 2 tablespoons for my five cups, and it made bad coffee.” No, YOU made bad coffee. You should not be allowed to own or even TOUCH a coffee maker. Why did you even want to spend $69.99 on a coffee maker? Go to Target and get a $20 Mr. Coffee. Better yet, invest in big K-Cup and leave the rest of us out of your shenanigans.
Complain about the user experience. “The filter sits inside the carafe, so you have to hold the lid while you pour the coffee.” Have you ever used a coffee machine with a carafe that could pour without holding the lid at least a little bit to avoid maximum spillage? Also, this design is called POUR OVER and it makes for some really delicious coffee… if you buy delicious coffee beans, whole, then grind them to the appropriate size using a burr grinder… oh hey, did I put you to sleep? Sorry. Go get your K-Cup coffee and try to keep up.
In conclusion, this post doesn’t actually have anything to do with coffee or death. It has to do with me dealing with grief by regressing into creating my own LiveJournal instead of just keeping a regular private journal of my emotions like a regular fucking person. Thank you for coming along.
