Wake up and smell the coffee

I finally did it. I finally went and bought myself a coffee maker [1]. And not just any old coffee maker but one of those ones where you can pre-program it to brew at a certain time, so that I woke up this morning to the smell of freshly brewed coffee filling my room (now there's an alarm clock I could live with), the day dripping slowly into my consciousness.

I just love the smell of coffee. There's something acute and finely balanced about it, something witty and almost ironic. Like the smell were smirking at you. It doesn't perk me up - it sharpens me as though I were a pencil, bringing my alertness to that fine, thin point where I'm ready to take on the world again. Instant coffee doesn't smell this way - it has a sterile, almost plastic smell - the smell of machinery and processing. Freshly brewed coffee, on the other hand, has a fragrance like polished metal, like smelling the grease on the railway tracks after the train has just passed.

Of course, this also means that despite myself I've ended up with one more possession to take care of. Worse, with the coffee maker in place I'm actually considering abandoning my all styrofoam policy and actually buying something non-disposable to drink out of. Like a mug (see picture above - it's a real mug shot. Heh). Next thing you know I'll be wanting to own land. Or sofas. Sigh.

[1] Technically I bought the thing a week ago on the Internet - it just got delivered yesterday. This meant that I spent most of last week suffering withdrawal pangs from not drinking the coffee from the coffee maker I hadn't got yet. It's such a wonderful feeling when the world finally catches up with you.