Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

How to make drip coffee

Posted on Written by

Whenever I mention that I like drinking coffee, many people say, “Oh, so do I!” Whenever I mention that I like making it at home, I’ve many times heard, “Oh, it doesn’t taste good when I make it. I get it out.” Usually at Starbucks.

Honestly, making coffee at home — regular old boring drip coffee — is really easy.

Step 1: Stop going to Starbucks.

I think Starbucks and Peets make terrible drip coffee. They over roast their beans. Many Americans confuse extreme dark roasting with good coffee. STOP THIS. You are just encouraging bad behavior. There are many types of beans and different types of roasts. There are entire books dedicated to this topic. Suffice to say: enough with the Dark French roasts. You’re killing it for the rest of us.

Starbucks and Peets are good for one thing: coffee with lots of milk and sugar in it, to the point where you can’t even tell it’s coffee. I love Starbucks Gingerbread Latte at the holidays. I always have to tell them “no whip,” because who the hell puts whipped cream on a latte? STOP THAT. And Frappucinos? If you want a milkshake, get a milkshake. It tastes better and you’re not trying to fool yourself that it’s “just” coffee.

Step 2: You need good cold water.

Coffee is only as good as the water it’s made from, because the drink is mostly water. If you don’t like drinking the water that comes out of your tap, I guess you’ll need bottled. Most Americans overestimate the badness of their tap water, however, and underestimate the badness of bottled water (which is terrifically wasteful). Unless your water is seriously hard or has a sulfur smell, it’s probably okay. Just make sure it’s cold.

Don’t use water that’s been sitting around, because water can get flat. Just get water as cold as you can.

Step 3: Use freshly roasted beans and grind them yourself.

Beans get stale just sitting around. A good rule of thumb is about two weeks — if you don’t use coffee that quickly, try to buy as small an amount as possible, and preferably from a seller who will do you the honor of stamping when the beans were roasted somewhere on the package.

You don’t want to use pre-ground beans (like Folger’s or some other supermarket bean). Because when the coffee comes in one of those big canisters, you have zero idea when they were ground (possibly during a previous Presidency). The whole reason for grinding beans is to release those yummy oils that make coffee so tasty. So when you open a canister of previously ground beans, that yummy smell coming out? Is your coffee. All that’s left is dry, tasteless coffee bean bits.

So: get beans as freshly roasted as you can, and grind them yourself. I recommend getting a dedicated coffee grinder, like the Capresso Infinity Burr Grinder – Black, because you can set the size of the grind you want, and the grinder makes it perfectly. You can’t get the perfect grind in one of those spice grinders, because you’ll either under-grind (leaving coffee bean pieces too large) or over-grind (making the ground coffee too fine, which makes it more likely to slip through the filter, and therefore making the resulting coffee too strong).

Step 4: Use 1 tablespoon of coffee grounds per six-ounce cup of water.

Yes. For some reason, when calculating the perfect cup of coffee, you calculate a cup as being six fluid ounces instead of eight. It’s not like the English system makes any sense anyhow.

If you want strong coffee, make your tablespoons heaping. If you want slightly weaker coffee, make them scant. This isn’t rocket science; it’s just math.

So: in order to make enough coffee for you and your two friends (all of whom will have two cups, because your coffee is awesome), let’s say you’re going to make six cups of coffee.

Measure out 6 heaping tablespoons of ground coffee into the filter. Using a measuring cup, measure out 36 ounces of cold water.

Step 5. Use a good drip coffee maker.

I find the machines that have a cone filter (like Cuisinart or my late, lamented Krups) make better coffee than a Mr. Coffee (which uses a flat-bottomed filter — what’s that design about, anyhow? Don’t they know that the coffee is headed downwards?). But the coffee I made in the Mr. Coffee was just fine. I also prefer gold filters to paper filters, because you can reuse gold filters, and paper filters have been known to disintegrate in my hands. NOT THAT I’M BITTER ABOUT THAT.

Ta da! You now have very good coffee, made in your own home.

If you must go to Starbucks for coffee, don’t get their regular drip. It’s dreadful. Instead, get an Americano, which is espresso mixed with hot water and approximates drip coffee. (Americano = that weak stuff Americans drink.) Starbucks uses robo-espresso makers, which makes the espresso the exact same way every time. It’s a lot more tolerable than their drip.

You’re welcome.

Stop the drama

Posted on Written by

There’s a forum I hang out on—yes, Otto, the-forum-that-shall-not-be-named—and there’s one section that’s basically about people asking for life advice. Many of those asking questions are younger, usually in their early twenties. I find myself giving a lot of advice, from the perspective of my advanced years. I can boil most of my advice down to one phrase. It’s applicable to almost every situation, and it’s applicable to thee and to me.

And that advice is: STOP THE DRAMA.

Stop the histrionics. Stop seeking approval or acceptance or admiration by dialing all of your emotions and experiences up to 11. Start looking at your life as though you have a modicum of control over it, because you DO. You CAN choose how you respond to things, both emotionally and physically. You are the one who will decide what you do right now.

Having drama in your life is having heightened emotions. It’s about how something sounds rather than the truth of what is.

A lot of us, particularly when we’re younger, are addicted to the dramatics of a situation. We confuse feeling emotion about a situation—“He done me wrong!” “She talked about me behind my back!” “She stole my shoes!”—for the relative importance of the situation. We run to our friends and want their commiseration or even their admiration for how totally crazy our lives are.

We all have the friends who have crazy crap happen to them left and right, and we think, “How come their lives are so much more dramatic than mine is?” Because they’re CHOOSING to be that way. It makes them feel alive, like they’re the star of their own story. When in reality…they’re allowing themselves to be buffeted by external events. Past the age of 25, it’s not cute any more. Get a grip on reality, accept that you’re in charge, and act accordingly.

When I was in college, I got involved with this guy I’ve charitably described as a “sociopath.” Using words like that is being dramatic about it. At the time I got a lot of mileage out of feeling used and abused, out of the drama of how he was going to treat me this week, out of the choices of how I was going to live my life because of this one guy. I made him the bad guy and me the victim.

Whereas if I were going to cut the drama and really engage in what what happening, I would allow myself to feel sad that I had spent so much time with this guy, I would feel compassion for myself that I allowed him to make me feel like dirt, and I would say, “You know, I don’t need this kind of person in my life.” No late-night crying with friends, no histrionics. Move on. I would take control and realize that it really is better to be alone than in bad company, and then I would see that I had opened up space in my life to have better company.

Take this test: Pick a situation you feel highly emotional about right now and you want to call all of your friends about. Here’s what I want you to tell your friend: “Okay, I’m going to tell you about something that happened. Here’s what I want you to do: nothing. Don’t respond in any way. Don’t agree with me, don’t comment on what this other person did, just listen to me.”

If your reaction to that scenario is, “Why would I tell someone about this if they weren’t going to side with me and tell me that I’m the victim here?” then you’re still caught up in the drama.

Here’s another test: do you use exaggerated comparatives to describe your situation? That is, is it the “worst” thing he’s done, the “scariest” thing that’s ever happened, the “best” relationship you can imagine having, so you have to hold on to it, at all costs?

(A friend–who lived a fairly dramatic life himself–once coined, “It was the WORST thing that’s EVER happened to ANYONE in the history of Western Civilization!” He was kidding. I think.)

If you’re using these kinds of terms to describe the situation, you’re being dramatic. You’re more involved with having a good story than you are with what’s actually going on.

STOP. Take a few minutes to sit quietly. Relate the facts of the situation: not “My boyfriend humiliated me in front of every single important person in my life!” but “Bob said some really mean things about me in front of lots of my friends.” Then ask yourself how you truly feel about this situation, here and now, not acting out in front of anyone. Now ask, What are you going to do about it?

There is nothing wrong with feeling emotion about a situation. If your friends from college turn out to be bad, unstable roommates (as happened to me), feel sad because your friendship wasn’t what it was…and then make plans to move elsewhere. No need for drama. Take control.

And looking back at it… I’m sure I was no prize as a roommate either.

The more you harness your own energy and spend it on the important stuff in your life rather than making every little upset its own vortex, the easier it gets, and the more powerful you get. If someone tries to drag you into their drama, you say, “This is not for me,” and you leave them to it.

It can be scary though. If you give up having drama in your life and choose to face your emotions and your reactions head on, here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to be the one in charge. You have no one to blame, because if a friend goes nutso on you, you can’t run around and say, “Gaaaaah! What do I do?” You can’t have screaming arguments about who’s right and who’s wrong. You get to decide how you’re going to handle it, without making a good story out of it.

You’re also going to lose friends. Friends who put up with your dramatics so they can touch the electric wire of crazy emotions. Friends who are used to dumping their drama on you. Once you start responding to their stories with, “Wow, you seem really upset about that. What are you going to do about it?” you’ve just punctured their drama. You’re not their audience any more. They’re going to go elsewhere.

Trust me. Finding other adults who can deal with their own emotions and lives like, well, adults, is a real treat.

Random and assorted, plus advice!

Posted on Written by

Several very large, very polite men from Jack Trux Moving are taking everything out of my current house and loading it on to a couple of trucks, which will then take it all to the new house, where we will live where the current house gets demolished inside and rebuilt. This is a very exciting, very nerve-wracking process. Nonetheless, Darin and I manage to be quite cheery about it. I don’t know whether this is optimism, stupidity, or just simple naivete. Seems to have worked out okay so far.

Darin took the kids to see Ponyo, in order to get them out of the house for this part. I have chosen to remain behind, both to answer questions (since I’ve already decided where everything’s going in the new house and the floor plan exists only in my head) and to do laundry. Because like death and taxes, there is always laundry.

§

I have new goals in life:

  • To have laundry minions, who will just take care of the laundry for me, dammit, day in and day out. I know laundry isn’t the greatest trauma in the world, but it’s such a pain in the ass.
  • Next year, I want to do the world’s most perfect move: walk out the door of one place, walk in the door of the next. No movers, no boxes, no unpacking, no tsuris. All new stuff waiting for us at the end; leave the doors open on the old place for looters, et al. Darin has said that if I can figure out how to do it for our move back to this house, he is all for it.

I didn’t say they were important goals.

§

I’ve been hanging out a lot at my favorite fashion forum, only not in the fashion areas, but in the chat-about-life areas. Many (though by no means all) of the posters on the forum are young women in their early 20s, and God help me, I want to shake them so badly. I know, there are certain truths you can only learn for yourself, and people can tell you this stuff over and over and you won’t grok it until you get it for yourself.

But if I could get a few things through to these women (and, by extension, to 20-year-old me), I would say:

  • You are all you have. Anything more than that you have access to (family, friends, money, living situation): awesome. But in the end, you are all you got. Act accordingly and treat yourself like the special, important person you are.

    Important corollary: you are all you need, too. Which is convenient and cuts down on the number of things you need to stuff in your bags.

  • Not everybody’s going to like you. There’s no magic formula of niceness or agreeability that will make you popular. In fact, the popular people are the ones with strong convictions, who go ahead and do what they want no matter what you think.

    The trick is, You have to actually not care what other people think about every damn thing you do. Conveniently, this turns out to be much, much easier than we were led to believe as children.

  • Don’t wait. Ever. For anything or anyone. You don’t get extra points for being the patient, uncomplaining one. In fact, you’re probably going to get stepped on for your troubles. The person you are waiting for is not going to wake up one day and go, “Oh gosh, that person who’s just been so accommodating—she’s the one!” Your boss is not going to say, “Hmmm, who’s the best worker, the one who never says anything or the one who tells me in detail about their weekly accomplishments and is vocal about taking on new responsibilities?” The whole Discovering-Cinderella shtick wasn’t true back then and it ain’t true now.

    When I was investigating agents to query, I was amazed at the number of people who focused on the one agent they wanted and they were just going to wait forever for the response from that person. My advice was always: Move on. If they want you, they’ll get back to you. In the meantime, check out who else is out there. Which brings me to…

  • Make them (boy, job, whatever) reject you. Don’t decide ahead of time you’re not going to get it. Ask for it, and make them say No. Yes, rejection hurts. So, somebody doesn’t like you. Here’s your mantra: NEXT. That one didn’t work out? NEXT.

    A young woman I know got a callback for a role in a Harry Potter film…and decided she wasn’t going to get it, so she didn’t even go. I want to shake her! But what’s done is done. And I’m not so sure that the universe is going to make that offer too many more times. (Yes, I’m anthropomorphizing the universe. You’d be surprised how well that actually works.)

  • Just say what you want. No demands, no threats. It’s a simple formula: “I want such-and-so, and I will not accept anything less.” If you get something less, honor your commitment to yourself and leave. That’s it. This bargaining skill works with everything: lovers, jobs, children.

    For example, many people have noted that we have good communication skills with our kids: we tell them what we expect of them, and we tell them what’s going to happen if they don’t live up to it. This doesn’t stop me from yelling…but generally the yelling happens when I wasn’t clear enough before hand, so: my bad. (And when I get a hold of myself, I apologize to the kids for my behavior.)

  • The guy he is right now is the guy he’s going to be forever, unless he decides to change. Deal with the person in front of you, not the person you want him to be.

    If I read one more goddamn romance (or bulletin board thread) where the object is to transform the bad boy through the magic of the (patient, understanding, loitering) woman’s love, I’m going to vomit. Remember that line from As Good As It Gets where Jack Nicholson says, “You make me want to be a better man”? The only response to that is, “Then go ahead and work on that, and right now I’m going to go out and find someone who’s already there.”

  • It really is better to be alone than in bad company. The nice thing is, there are so many good people out there to be with!
  • Stop worrying so damn much about how you look. You’re never going to look prettier than you do right now. And pretty/fashionable/anorexic has nothing to do with how attractive you are or how much you get laid. We have all known size Whatever women who could attract anyone they want, because they like themselves no matter what. Is it more fun to be with someone who likes herself, or one who’s criticizing herself all the time?
  • Yes, if you stand up for yourself and what you want, you’re probably going to lose some friends. Conveniently, this will weed out which of your friends aren’t really your friends, which we can only regard as a BONUS!

Mind you, I’ve learned every single one of these the hard way, and many of them I have to keep telling myself, over and over, day in and day out. But when I’m using them, I feel so much more powerful and in control and every day life is just so much more enjoyable!