Learning curves
The French press coffee pot is a delicate instrument, requiring old-fashioned care and vigilance. You must not grind the coffee too fine; you must stir the grounds into the water, before and after pressing down with the plunger, to obtain a proper and homogeneous suspension; you must rinse the pot and its plunger well. With what do you stir the coffee in the pot? With a spoon. And, while you wait for the coffee to brew before stirring it again, what do you do with the spoon?
The pot itself has no answer. The spoon ends up covered in coffee grounds and if you set it on the counter it will make a mess. Where can you set a spoon covered in coffee grounds? Where? In a bowl? On a napkin? Must you rinse the spoon twice in order to set it down?
A brain in need of coffee is not a brain that can easily solve problems with spoons. But at some point I located a little soy-sauce dish (I think) and I took to setting the coffee spoon in the dish. "Look, Paul," I said, "a dish. We can put the spoon in the dish." He glanced at the dish and, after determining that it had nothing to do with novels, dissertations, Chopin or money, most likely thought: "J. is pointing at a dish. Also, there might be coffee soon."
Some time after that I noticed a mess on the toaster. "Paul," I said, "can we schedule a time for me to train you with the coffee spoon?" Ho ho ho, great merriment, etc. I left the house and, when I came home three hours later, saw a familiar sight. I wondered if it would be polite to leave a note; then I saw the magnetic alphabet and the magnetic poetry set.
The lesson here is that Paul is able to stay focused on important tasks, whereas I get bizarrly distracted by the coffee spoon. I don't think there is any other lesson.
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