O Toddy, My toddy

It’s iced-coffee season again and I’m stuck with extra strong coffee dumped over ice from Alterra. Bah. Last year, the New York Times published an article about the cold-brew method and its superiority to any other way to brew coffee that you intend to water down with ice cubes. This is so true.

Toddy is my favorite way to brew cold coffee. You need one pound of coffee beans (ground for drip) and 9 cups of filtered water. Let it sit 8-12 hours. Then pour the concentrated coffee over ice in a glass, filling only about 1/3 full. Then top the rest off with filtered water and stir. Then drink it, maybe with cream and sugar if you like. So what’s that… a 2:1 water to Toddy coffee concentrate ratio.

This type of brewing also produces a lower acidity coffee for people with sensitive stomachs. Not lower caffeine though. So it’ll still rev you up on a hot summer morning.

Don’t speak to me! Stay with me!

<headline paraphrased from Waiting for Godot>

A guy with a blog is an introvert? Figure that out. Run a Google search for introvert vs. extrovert and you’ll get lots of posts like this one where people complain about how society excludes them and how people, even friends and significant others, misunderstand them. With that in mind, let me point you in the direction of this article about introverts from The Atlantic. It must have been linked a jillion and one times already. Jillion-two.

It’s me. I’m the introvert. I like books. I like cooking. Hiking. Gardening. Watching cream swirl in my coffee. Decorating my house with treasures that have significance only known to me (and maybe one other person). I like thinking without speaking. But I like talking too. I like people. They aren’t a burden and don’t really wear me out. If they’re the right people. Sometimes the wrong people can be entertaining too.

Conventional wisdom says that introverts are ground into a paste by parties and social situations. That they need time to recharge. I feel perfectly fine after a night of fraternizing with colleagues and friends. Some gatherings make me tired. The boring ones. I think I can find common ground on this with the other three-quarters to half of the population that are extroverts. Boring people and parties come in all flavors. But a room full of people ruminating is a library. No one likes libraries.

Am I abnormal because I don’t have a smooth anecdote for every social interaction? Larry David made a mint off the awkwardness that comes with everyday contact between humans. It’s normal. And it isn’t an offshoot of my introversion. It’s just me.

My brain is apparently designed to take in information during conversations and store it away for future reference, not necessarily to formulate the next topic based on what I’m hearing. But I like conversation with others. I don’t deliberately isolate myself. Human society demands interaction. People thrive and grow based on their social networks. It’s just how our world works. I get that.

There’s an interesting book on this topic that I read (mostly, which means I slightly didn’t) a couple years ago. The Loner’s Manifesto by Anelli Rufus outlines the fallacy in the statement that people who are alone just lack the skills to connect with others. The book goes beyond the point that introverts are biologically different. Rufus doesn’t whine about being oppressed by a society of extroverts. She examines societal views of loners and the impact on people who choose isolation. She cites examples that I can identify with, but I’m not sure her conclusions meet up with my point of view either. She revels in those actions that defy society in unconventional ways. For example, she concludes her book with a story of her father on his deathbed asking to be alone. I may be an introvert, but it feels cold-hearted and unsentimental to highlight this. Sort of paints us as selfish. It lacks the depth of feeling that all introverts crave. Deep emotional examination is the reason why we exist. Or at least why I exist. I’m not a loner. There aren’t things about me you shouldn’t understand. (Poor Pee Wee).

This post was originally a vehicle to link that Atlantic article at the top of this page. I thought this was a topic I wanted others to consider. But I’m left with the feeling that human behavior varies too much from person to person to lump people into behavioral groups based on what part of our brain we use to get our data about the world. So don’t blame the introvert in me and I won’t blame the extrovert in you for your reactions or actions… to whatever happens in this world. The warp and woof of our lives forms a pattern too complicated for such a simple explanation.

Quiz-o-rama (not the boring kind)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/index_surveys.shtml

Found these surveys from the BBC when I was researching the inconsistency and frequency of internet posts on the topic of introversion vs. extroversion.  They actually are interesting if you’re up late at night, stuck at work all day or unemployed and already sent out 25 resumes today.

Wisc-kerino!

Franz Joseph. I’m considering trimming my beard into a Franz Joseph style. A Garibaldi would be grand, but I don’t have the whiskers for it. So I keep my modern Hollywoodian for now.

While I was browsing for beard styling inspiration, I discovered the Whiskerino site and realized I can’t enter until November of aught nine. Fine. There are lots of men in the badger state who don’t shave all winter. We should have our own contest. An old fashioned Wisc-kerino? See, I even have a name for it already. Planning meeting at Annona Bistro, date TBD.

Love & Laundry: Forgive Me

I hate laundry. From the moment it leaves my body after a day of wear to the time it shows up clean in my dresser, I resent its presence in my house. I wish, when I take them off and toss them towards the hamper, my pants would just disappear in a poof of smoke and fire like magician’s flash paper.  I’d have to talk to a magician to find out how to make them reappear cleaned and pressed in my closet.  Or that cleaner over on Milwaukee Street.

.

In the spirit of This American Life’s recent segment on the topic of This is Just to Say poem spoofs, I present a rewriting of a rewriting of William Carlos Williams’ poem.

Those who I am asking for forgiveness include Exponential and the owner of this Blog.

.

I have dried the jeans

made of denim

which were in the corner of the bedroom

and which

you were probably

planning to air dry

.

Forgive me

if you had done

the laundry yourself

they would not be

so tight

and unyielding against your thighs

Bleu Plate Special

Monty’s Blue Plate in Madison. Mmmmmmmmmm. Awwwwwwwww. Cute. And gross. That’s Cholula hot sauce inside the ketchup heart. My own addition to the artwork.

Mein Herz Brennt!

Mr. Bento Porn

It’s just a Flickr group. Calm down.

Upon receiving an invitation to dine out for an Indian lunch, I tried to recall the name of the tradition in India where lunch food is prepared at home or by street vendors and then delivered in small metal boxes to people’s places of work. Dabbawala or Tiffin Wallah was the term that escaped me. I’m not sure if my memory has been jogged properly and that could be the wrong term. The thought process, faulty or not, lead me to discover something more useful than knowledge…a cool gadget.

The tool you saw if you clicked on the Flickr group link is Mr. Bento. It strikes me as a better way to quarantine edible glutenfull items while traveling in mixed company. The mix of folks being those who are tolerant of wheat and those who are intolerant - of wheat. As a bonus prize which will serve to entertain me all afternoon, I found Mr. Bento and his cult. See the pretty snapshots …

Medieval Career Advice

Every personality test and career profile I’ve ever taken tells me I am compassionate and creative — as well as inefficient and unrealistic. Even in ye olde times, I would have been too idealistic for the real world. The test that I linked to below tells you where you’d fit (in very broad strokes) professionally had you been living over half a millennium earlier in human history. I’m not certain I would have had a choice about my vocation way back when but it appears I’d make a good jester, musician, philosopher, priest or puppeteer.

The test

My results

Atom Age Vampire

And then there was Atom Age Vampire Animation! MST3K Style

Part One

Banana Republic

No one’s going to make a movie starring Daniel Day Lewis that details in haunting fashion the rise of a fruit magnate in the the early 1900s. But a journalist who writes for Popular Science might draft a book about how banana plantations have shaped our modern political and economic structures using many of the same ruthless methods for which oil companies are famous. Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, by Dan Koeppel is my favorite idea for a book that I haven’t yet read.

Were I an illustrator, I’d draw an image of the topless Chiquita banana girl but with many limbs, reaching out across an antique map of the West Indies, Central and South America. You’ll just have to imagine.