Venti Double Meltdown: The Coffee Grinder Story

Originally posted May 25, 2010 on an old version of this blog. 
One thing you never think about before you take active steps to alter your outlook on life, is how altering said outlook affects those around you. This becomes apparent almost immediately when changes start to take place but before you get to that point you’re likely so stuck in your head that you are incapable of fathoming how your friends and family feel towards you.

One year for my birthday (or Christmas, I don’t remember) my Mom bought me a disc-burr mechanism coffee grinder to replace the blade grinder I’d used all through college. It worked ok, but periodically it’d clog up with coffee grounds and become unusable. When this happened, beans in the reservoir had to be dumped out and the inner workings of the grinder need to rooted out with this little brush which is as tedious as it sounds and twice as  messy. Much like the furnace in the Holiday classic “A Christmas Story,” this coffee grinder was a hot topic of controversy and rage in our otherwise happy home. It was not uncommon to hear me melodramatically shouting things like ”ALL I WANT IN MY LIFE IS A CUP OF GODDAMN COFFEE AND I CAN’T EVEN HAVE THAT!!” before slamming this thing around the kitchen. More often than not this rooting process had to be repeated with several attempts and still often resulted in unsuccessful cleaning of the grinder mechanism to a working state. In the end, coffee grounds end up everywhere and I am enraged well beyond my capacity for rational thought and the grinder is unceremoniously hurled to the kitchen floor with me yelling and stomping around the apartment to find my keys so I can drive to Starbucks.

In retrospect I probably should have been drinking tea.

One day, this scenario started as it often has in the past: the coffee grinder began grinding as normal and then made that familiar, blood-boiling *GRRRRRRR-* and seized up. The difference this time being that the inclusion of my anti-anxiety medication seemed to transform my usual Donald Duck-esque meltdown born of irrational frustration  into a simple sigh and the proclamation that “I am just not in the mood to deal with this shit right now.” Shortly after saying this I noticed Kim sitting at her desk, hands pressed against her cheeks with her eyes bugging out.

Obviously tweaked out a little, she said, “Let’s just get rid of the thing, babe.”

“Bah.. It just needs to be cleaned. I’ll do it later, ” I responded. And so it sat on the sink for the next 24 hours.

I took another stab at cleaning it. This time I noticed the brush wasn’t even penetrating the wall of grounds that had caked themselves inside. The combination of bad design and a wet brush had formed, over time, into a kind of coffee bean adobe compound inside of the grinder. It was not coming unclogged using conventional methods. Nevertheless, I diligently tried to make it work and every time resulting in that same aggravating *GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-* sound of zero productivity and every time Kim experiencing a Pavlovian response of panic and anxiety and becoming more insistent that we “just get rid of it.”

I, however, never lost my temper with it.

Finally addressing what I thought was going on my wife’s mind, I said, “I think you’re more angry at this thing than I am now.”

“I keep expecting you to just lose it and go berserk and I can’t help brace myself for it.”

I had programmed her without realizing it. I felt horrible.

Despite thinking I could probably take this grinder apart and fix it, I felt like maybe I needed to just take this one for the team and throw it in the dumpster and start over with a new coffee grinder. But my frugality wouldn’t let me just do that. So I left it on the counter and went to my office to plan my next step.

One day I was home alone and I started chatting with my buddy Luke Worley who I’d once given a french press to. I thought he might understand my anecdotal coffee-induced rage and since Luke is a pretty clever guy, I thought he might have an idea on how to fix this thing. I sat at my computer, IM’ing Luke the details of my situation. His response: “You can put rice in it and it will fix it right up.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, man. I saw it on TV.”

“Fuck it. I’ll do it.”

I knew damned well it wasn’t gonna work, but if by some slim chance it did work then hey we’d have a coffee grinder again.. but I knew it wouldn’t. I knew Luke had something wrong with this rice business. In retrospect, I think rice is intended to clean the burrs which it very well may have done in this case had the chute not already been rendered impassable with impacted coffee grinds. The fistful of rice basically just filled in the spaces between the coffee grinds and the grinder burrs to make it EVEN MORE FUCKING CLOGGED. The frustrating *GRRRRRRRR-* of the burrs trying to move past the coffee grounds became a *NNNNNNNN-* of the motor trying to turn the burrs. This thing was beyond fucked.

I cackled out loud.

When I explained what I did to my wife, she asked me if I thought Luke’s rice method was really going to work.

“Absolutely not,” I said and I dropped it in the garbage can.

I now have a manual crank coffee grinder and I love it. Less messy, less prone to disaster. No motor. Works when the power goes out.

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When The Juice Isn’t Worth The Squeeze

When I recently decided to quit music. It was a lingering conflict that I wrestled with for a long time. I felt a tremendous amount of guilt over the idea of “being a quitter.” I also worried a lot about what my friends and family would say. Ultimately I found that what I needed to do was make myself happy, and find a place where I could return to music and really enjoy it again. I haven’t really enjoyed it for a long time. While publicly I am saying “I am quitting music.” I know that what I am doing is taking a retreat from the mindset of a professional musician. “Quit” is a strong word, and not the word I would optimally use, but it is the only word that my friends and family really understand. I am ok with the idea of not playing anymore– right now. I am not giving up on the idea of playing music ever in my life, but right now if I never played again I’d be ok with that. So it has to be “quit.”

The hardest part of making this decision is the sad and disappointed faces I see when I explain to them that I am not taking any more gigs, committing to any more projects, entertaining the idea of any more musical endeavors of any kind. A friend the other day said “yeah, but what about just hanging out with some dudes.. jamming.. drinking some beers?”

I said “I couldn’t be bothered.” And he just frowned. Truthfully there are a million other things I’d rather be doing (playing with my daughter or training Kali are the first two) than sitting in a hot storage building while some has-beens and never-will-bes masturbate musically with $4,000 guitars that will never be hit the by the light of a stage. It’s not fun for me. I’m too goal oriented for that.

My friend is a photographer, an artist with the same chest-pounding convictions that many artists have in that we are special and that some other-worldy bolt of lightning causes us to dart out of bed in the middle of the night and just MAKE ART. I don’t know that I agree with that, or have ever agreed. However, I acknowledge that I’d love to be wrong. I’d like to stop seeing the craftsman-side of the music business, the side that causes  amazing musicians to bend to the desires of the general public and say “well we could just play Brown Eyed Girl one more time and make some extra money.” I see music as a con, a dodge, a way to make ends meet… and a compromise. Art does not compromise.

 

Back at Berklee I had a professor– a trumpeter– who said that after years of touring on the road and developing some bad habits, he’d ruined his aperture posture. When it became a problem he went to a very well-respected trumpet instructor who said his only two solutions where to live with the problem or quit playing so the muscles in his jaw would atrophy to point where he’d lose his aperture and he could develop it back up from the beginning. He was on a time-table, he knew he’d be quitting for only a couple of years– but he’d be totally quitting for that time. This was not just a hobby, this was his income and way of life, to quit– even for a short period of time– equaled death in some real ways.

I don’t feel like quitting equals death, but I relate to his concern and I relate to the need to let some of these outlooks I have atrophy so I can build back a more positive impression of what music and art SHOULD be.  Hopefully, I will feel the need to tinker and play at home and some of that may end up on my Soundcloud account. At the moment, I just want everyone to know that not everyone who quits is a quitter.

 

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You Are Here

You_are_here_-_T-shirt

If I could boil down and distill the message of this blog to a single idea it is to be present and mindful. It’s not something I know a lot about, yet, but it’s something I am working on diligently. I don’t know who said it first, but there is a saying that depression is a fixation on the past and anxiety is a fixation on the future and that happiness is in the now. I’ve struggled with both depression and anxiety at different points in my life and I can see the truth in this idea. The effort to become more mindful and present has been a cornerstone of my unexpected success with studying Filipino martial arts and my decision to step away from the world of professional musicianship and it will be, ultimately, what helps me to pursue a new career outside of my IT-related doldrums… whatever that may be.

The desire to become more present, perhaps, is what is leading me down some new paths I never expected.

On Monday I walked across the street from work to Barnes & Noble with the intention of buying a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Princeton educated Zen master from Vietnam I’d read about online who has a reputation for presenting Zen philosophy in a way which is easily digestible for those new to Buddhism, particularly Westerners. I didn’t know specifically what book I was going to get but I’d read some reviews on a lot of his books and the core value in many of them was this idea of becoming present in your every day life: Breathing mindfully. Walking mindfully. Washing the dishes.. mindfully. I settled on a book titled “You Are Here” and I immediately fell in love with it. 

Thich Nhat Hanh does indeed present his ideas in a digestible way as I found the first few pages I read before my Kali class on Monday to be ideas I could apply immediately. In many previous rendezvous with Yoga practitioners and students of Buddhism, I felt, frankly, inadequate. I’d hear the instructions to “Take long, mindful breaths.” and I could, when I was relaxed and focused enough to think to do so, but it wasn’t something I felt I could assimilate when I really needed it. This book acknowledges that short-coming. To be present isn’t to fight your breath, or your fear or your anger, it is to observe and care for it like a child.

“If the in-breath is short, let it be short.” 

That same Monday, as part of our warm up before class, we did the usual jog around the mats while Guro entices us with a rattan staff to strike and block various attacks and then he had us line up to do some shoulder rolls while holding our Kali sticks. These are the kinds of rolls often seen in a Judo or Jiu-Jitsu class and were assimilated into Filipino Martial Arts many years ago by Grandmaster Cacoy Canete (click this link!). As soon as I see the class lining up to do this I became very anxious. I’m not a tumbler, and in my brief experience with Judo and Jiu-Jitsu I was reminded of that allegation when we warmed up with these kinds of tumbling exercises: falls, rolls, backrolls, etc.. I’d start with excellent form and end up rolling down the mats on my side like a hotdog on a flat grill. The addition of holding a stick was just going to make this more embarrassing. As I approached my turn in the queue, my heart started to beat a little faster and I was thinking “I don’t know about this… I don’t know about this.. but definitely do not tell yourself you can’t do this or you’re totally screwed.” I made a conscious effort to say that it was ok to doubt myself a little, because I don’t need to be a Zen master with boundless inner peace and zero self-doubt. Effectively I was saying to myself that it was ok to be anxious and to care for my anxiety, but I would not give into it. I anthropomorphized my anxiety as a crying child. It wailed the way my own daughter will sometimes fuss and cry when she is tired, and I will do everything I can to calm her, but at some point it seems to best way to to deal with an upset baby who has been fed, changed, and comforted, is to let them cry and go to sleep. There are boundaries. Mine, in this case was that I refused to say– to think the word “can’t.”

I got to the edge of the mat… dropped on my shoulder, popped back up with my stick in my hand.. dropped again before the disbelief set in and popped back up and walked back to the line. I totally did it! My Kali “poker face” in tact I hurried to the back of the line. Finally, not being able to keep it in any longer I shouted, ”I didn’t know I could do that!” and my classmates laughed.

This Wednesday we did the same warm-up routine and I performed at least one shoulder roll well enough to warrant a positive exclamation from Guro Ervin. It is moments like this that keep me coming back to class. I feel like Bruce Willis’ character in the M. Night Shyamalan movie “Unbreakable.” I am discovering that I can do things that I just decided one day were not for me without anything backing up my decision except fear. I am slowly developing attributes which cause me to overcome shortcomings I thought were written into my DNA. I thought I knew where the limits were and now that they are obviously not where I thought they were, I keep wanting to add more weight onto the barbell because I don’t know how much I can actually lift!

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Coda

220px-Coda_sign.svgBefore I get into this completely, I’ll have you know that the seed was planted with this article by Nina Badzin and then some other events occurred and during the writing of the last sentence of my last post I came to this calm realization that I am going to stop playing music.

As a new father, a voracious student of martial arts, a musician and a guy with a day job I knew something was going to have to give at some point.  I can’t quit being a dad or a husband and because of my commitment to my family, I can’t quit my job  (even though I’d love to). That left two things: music and martial arts. Every time I talked with a band who wanted to rehearse on a day I normally had class, I’d politely refuse– so the writing was on the wall long before I was able to acknowledge it like an grown-ass man and face it. Not to mention that I’d just recently been crowded out by the band I was playing with on the regular so it’s not like I had to call up a bunch of people before I made this decision public.

My “career” has been over for years… I’m just now grown up enough to acknowledge that fact.

While looking for internet justification for my decision to quit music and not feel like a total failure, I came across this post at The Middle Finger Project. Several words of wisdom were made apparent, not the least of which is the fact that, as a culture, we treat quitting as a taboo. I particularly enjoyed this line:

“If, on the other hand, we are constantly in the process of change, but are also constantly trying to stick to our initial commitments & try to avoid being a quitter, we’re going to be pulled in both directions, never making progress in either.”

I should be honest with myself about one key detail when it comes to quitting music: I don’t know anyone who has actually managed to do it. I know people who have retired from performing, I know people who’ve stopped music work in general, but music is still a part of their lives and some of them still pull off a gig once in awhile because they just can’t help themselves (or the money was too good to refuse). I fully intend for music to always be a part of my life and the life of my daughter, and it’s that intention– wrought from one of the last remaining seeds of positivity I have for the art–  that has brought me to this conclusion which has been staring me in the face for almost a decade and I have just been too scared to face it or too proud to admit defeat:

I hate gigging. I hate rehearsing. I hate the music scene in my home town.

I’ve spent a lot of energy chiding and pushing myself by saying I should be doing this because if I don’t, then I am not a professional musician and if I’m not a professional musician then I am a failure. Well I don’t care about being a professional musician anymore and I’m not a failure. I have other joys in my life and I’d rather throw myself into them without hesitation than continue down this self-sabotaging path.

I am not upset about this decision at all. When I was finally able to make it, I felt so much better. A weight was lifted from my shoulders. Music will still exist in my home and I hope that this decision leads to me really loving to create music and joyfully play my instrument again.

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