My family recently decided (recently as in for a few months) to purchase an espresso machine. As some of the readers may know (or not), my family is a huge lover of teas and coffees, and it didn’t really make much sense not to have one. Oh, we had one, yes, but it was one of those really old manual style ones before the semi-automatics came into being. So I was sent on a hunt.

Now the thing about espressos (or coffee or wine or tea, for that matter) is that it’s sort of an art. Not a science, no. It requires a very sense-based adjustment that doesn’t have a formula, and the opinions vary from one to another: aluminium is good. Aluminium is not good. You want a big portafilter. You don’t want a big portafilter. the grinder should be separate. The grinder shouldn’t be separate. One shouldn’t buy a grinder at all, but instead by ground beans. E.t.c. E.t.c.

To be honest, I don’t think it makes that much difference. I have never heard of anyone going “Oh, you rotten person, you didn’t brew this correctly! Clearly you didn’t use a big portafilter” upon imbibing. But clearly they make a difference, or something.

Anyway, after much consideration and seeing a $100 off from a Gaggia machine, we decided to purchase it. It shipped fast (yey for UPS); it was packed quite well; and the price was good. And it arrived today.

I should have known it would be a perilous quest to get my first drink of espresso, considering that it’s a freaking Italian product.

First, the beans. As we don’t have a burr grinder (yet), I was sent by my mother to buy the beans on the way back home from uni. Fine. I searched on Yelp, found Lavazza very close to my other campus, and after surviving through the physical chemistry exam and a differential equations class, I hopped onto the shuttle bus. I got dropped off. I turned on my GPS service on my phone. Yelp stated that they close at 9:00 PM. Fine.

So I walked from E. Pearson to Walton, which is about a five minute walk. Mind you, this is before five pm. Clearly still normal business hours. The Lavazza was a teeny tiny place, but looked cosy. I pushed the door open and…

nothing happened.

Pushed again. Nothing happened. Some fat git inside (I think he was the barista) looked at me, but did nothing. Pushed again. Nothing. Puzzled, I looked at the operating hours.

… FOUR PM?!

If this was NatWest in the colonnade at Guy’s Campus, I’d give up. But this was Michigan Avenue. I was irritated. Six might be a reasonable time, but four clearly isn’t. There are still businessmen working at 4 pm. What if they wanted a cup of coffee? Starbucks would be operating; Lavazza would lose money.

But clearly they weren’t concerned.

Irked, I walked down the street, went to John Hancock Centre, and went into the Italian food shop/restaurant. They were open (they close at 7.30). Bought the beans. Went home. Unpacked the espresso machine. Ate supper. 

And then came the time to use the Gaggia Baby Black. First thing that puzzled me was there were three filters, while the manual clearly indicated just two. One was clearly just a single; the two others were doubles, but one just had one hole and the other had slightly larger holes (plural to a greater degree). Not sure about which one to use, I dug out the manual.

Nothing.

Read again. Nothing. Irked, I looked through the French translation. Utterly nothing. What kind of a manual was this?! I looked through the directions to making an espresso. Still nothing; what was even more puzzling, it said “to fit the filter (10 or 11) into the filter cup holder (9), then fit 9 to 11. How can you fit something into another, then fit that other thing back into that thing? That is physically impossible.

After searching on google and coming across a post by someone who had the same query, I proceeded to make my first cup of espresso. I used the double cup filter, pressed on, and waited…

and brown liquid sprayed out, some into the cups and a lot on the table cloth.

I was beyond irked at this point. I was also hating most Italians at this point, and was cursing most of the famous modern Italians, starting with Berlusconi to Carla Bruni (who is politically a French but she’s still an Italian). Italians clearly can’t be related to Romans; Romans made the aqueducts that are still in use today, while the Italians can’t even properly make a freaking espresso machine. The manual said NOTHING about “OUR MACHINE CHEERFULLY SPRAYS COFFEE ONTO YOU AND INTO THE CUP” clause. Instead, there was a curious black plastic part that evidently was supposed to go with “the good crema device”, but the good crema device wasn’t even in there.

“Maybe that black thing goes into the holder”, said my mother.

“That’s not what it says in the manual.”

“Oh, come now,” said my mother, “do you really thing Italians would read the manual before using this machine? Just try it.”

So I did. And lo and behold, no more spraying. My question is, why didn’t they just scrap with the retarded engineering which clearly is a failure and just make a better filter holder? Instead they just added this black plastic thing the size of my pinkie fingernail and did away with it. It’s prone to loss, breakage, and it’s just plain bad planning. I knew Italians weren’t exactly Germans (my philosophy professor or S. Git Giachetti, is a prime example) but this is beyond belief. Can’t they do anything right (apart from make shoes)?!

Needless to say, I can never live in Italy until I retire and no longer care about personal growth. When I’m seventy and am just looking to live my life as hedonistically as possible, I might move there. But spending 30 minutes trying to figure out the manual is just a waste of my time.

Gaggia, I am very very disappointed in you.

I have slept for the total amount of 12 hours for the last three days. Last night, I had to write three papers that are due next week. I have a physical chemistry exam this Thursday, a Modern Physics exam next Monday. And it literally feels like somebody is whipping me to trod forth, as if I am a racehorse that needs to finish a three hundred mile race before the end of the day.

Needless to say, not happy. At all.

This is literally how America works. You start running. And then you run faster. But everybody's running faster than before. So you run even faster, trying to get ahead. Some people still run faster. You run faster and faster, and the lactic acid's killing your legs, but you just can't take a rest...

What I'd love to do is take a nap. But I have a student coming in for writing instruction in 23 minutes. Lovely.

Contrary to what everybody tells you, majors evidently do count when it comes to the hard green cash. Of course, you’re better off majoring in mathematics when applying to law school just because your scores will be better, but looking at just bachelor levels, it seems that you’re better off doing cold, hard sciences.

The top achievers were engineering (of course), but other scienc-y stuff came in as well, such as applied mathematics and physics.

On the other hand, those which are generally called as Humanities came in quite low. What was surprising was, fashion design beat psychology. Granted, they seem to be the same in rigor of the curriculum (do you have to trudge through 50 pages of nothing but formulae and derivations? No. Do you have to sit in the lab for three hours watching the proverbial paint dry? No. Do you have to solve 50 problems for homework and hope to god that what you’re doing is right and not quietly developing an impossible physics phenomena? No.) but I think this is because of the flooding of the psych majors.

As for Philosophy (cough-junkie-cough), all I’ve learned so far is that as far as you write semi-coherently, you’ll get an A. This conclusion came from my philosophy class taken over the summer of which, I learned precisely the following:

1. Italians can’t understand German or English philosophy
1. This is probably due to the fact that they don’t need to suffer much. Good looking women, good food, good weather? What do you need to suffer about? (said Dietrich the German, not me)
2. Italian professors evidently have penises for brains
3. As far as you use big words and write something that vaguely sounds intelligent, an “respected professor who writes books” will give you an A. Never mind that I did not even crack open any of the assigned texts, missed half my classes, and wrote my final 2 hours before it was due (PS: I don’t understand why people try to establish “this professor’s very respected” just by the amount of stuff they published. If Naomi Campbell can publish a book, then it certainly doesn’t require much intellect to do so. And no, publishing papers in the Journal of Philosophy means nothing to me. If Socrates said an orange was an apple just because he was purely delusional on hemlock, we’d be tested on it and be forced to analyse it to death today.)

But then again, I’d better get paid better than those English majors, thank you very much. I have to sit in a lab, derive equations, argue with professors for hours on end just to see how time expands.

And for those of you who say “you go there to expand your horizon!!”, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I have not improved my writing skills since I graduated high school, not because I don’t learn, but because my university decided to place me out of the writing curriculum because evidently I write spectacularly. And training cognitive processes aren’t what you do at university nowadays; that’s what you used to do, back in the “good ol’ days at Oxbridge” as J’s father said once, but you are thrown information of which you are to digest it and regurgitate it on paper as much as possible and as fast as possible. Mathematics and the sciences may require some understanding (induce, deduce, the works) but English? Anyone with some reading skills and some thinking ability can do that, as I’ve learned.

Of course, if you say “Well, I’m certain I will become the next John Locke! People will analyse my texts and my notes for eons”, then I defer to thee, my friend. But as long as what you did in university was sit on your rear end and get stoned, too bad if you don’t land a job in this career-appalling day and age.

Said IM yesterday morning.

And to be honest, I’m inclined to agree.

IM and I have been faithful T-mobile users in the US. Heck, I was a T-mobile user back in London. My best friend in London uses T-mobile. My best friend here and my research professor both use T-mobile. And apart from one crappy incident during which I had no service over the weekend, the company’s doing fine. I like their monthly pay as you go plan, and I don’t mind not having top notch smartphone. It’s a good enough company that offers my needs at a cheap price.

It certainly beats AT&T, aka “the demon reincarnate from hell”, as IM said. AT&T just plain sucks. Dropped calls, bad customer service. E.t.c.

So when those two merge, we’re in big trouble.

A. We hate AT&T. That’s why we chose T-mobile. As internationals (as opposed to ‘I’m rooted to the USA and will never leave this country’), GSM is a must. Only T-mobile and AT&T offers this.

B. AT&T are just plain more expensive.

C. Their customer care stinks.

D. Did I mention the DROPPED CALLS?

So it’s either half the nation petitions Verizon to get GSM service, or we're going to hope to all the deities out there that the DOJ would block this merger.

On the other note, I managed to ding – ever so slightly, to the point you need magnifying glass to notice it – my new phone. I’m greatly annoyed. Why does that bloody phone have to be so difficult to open?

Of course, JB is gloating, much to our chagrin. IM and I use android, but he’s a freaking iPhone (jailbroken) user. In fact, he uses MacBook and an iPhone. I’m surprised he hasn’t proposed to Steve Jobs.

Guess who’s more computer savvy? Definitely not the Apple User.

I suppose this is a hypocritical thing to say.

IM is trying to whittle his class down (two sections, 80 people each) into 60 people (2 sections, 30 people each) or less. He originally requested one section of 30 students, but the department screwed something up. And then told him too bad.

Monsieur IM is not a happy chap, and therefore went ahead and decided to do everything he could to get as close as he could to his goal – 30 people class – and evidently this means being as cruel as possible to the poor, hapless medical student wannabe freshers. He figured that most people do not like 8.00 am class, nor do they like ridiculous curves for an A, and so decided to do both. He declared he had no office hours, so it’s appointment only. A is 95% and above. The class begins at an ungodly hour. Et cetera.

JB is faring only slightly better. He is a lab assistant and leading a fresher research team (part of the curriculum, evidently), and is wondering what sort of a bad thing he had done in his previous life to merit such a torture. His Rachmaninov went from cool, collected and passion hidden beneath a collected facade into a general overtone of “I’m just tired and need to sleep”.

I, as you may know, have taken upon myself to endure 21 credit hours of work. This includes Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics classes. And an English class (of which I am slightly peeved; if you are an university student and do not know the Protestant Reformation and why it happened, and how it was caused, then your educational institution was clearly a failure.), and a completely inconsequential philosophy class of which the assignments have nothing to do with the lectures whatsoever. And two researches. And two volunteerings.

I’m exhausted most of the time, but when I think about my friends, I can’t exactly sit down and take a rest. I feel that I need to keep moving. This isn’t a pleasant experience, but I suppose that’s what I came back for.