Green tea in an empty house

Somewhere in San Francisco

I never quite mastered the brewing of green tea. I didn't know you weren't supposed to use boiling hot water (lest it burn the leaves and change the flavor) until a few months ago. I can't even taste the difference between burned and unburned leaves. Maybe I'm branding myself a rookie to admit all this, but when it comes right down to it all I expect from my green tea is nice warm liquid and maybe a tiny caffeine buzz.

Pause while I grab the boiling kettle off the stove.

Wait 2-3 minutes for the water to cool.

Pour over my generic brand teabag. (This is unpretentious tea drinking at its finest.)

Take a seat at the computer, sip, breathe out the day's tension. Repeat.

Ah, maybe that's what burnt tastes like...kind of lonely, like someone cried a few bitter tears into your cup when you weren't looking.


My roommate moved out yesterday while I was at work, and I came home this morning to an almost surreal emptiness. I don't think there's anything more poignant than an empty room, newly vacated and awaiting its fate. It wasn't long, though--my new roommate's things appeared today, creating an entirely new landscape. But the room will sit here for the next few days, waiting to be lived in. It may be full of things, but it won't really feel full until someone has tossed a few clothes on the floor and mussed the bedspread a little. Right now, alone in this empty house, it makes me kind of uneasy--that unlived-in room awaiting its fate. My cup of tea is nice, but it's a poor substitute for the comfort of having someone in that room. Even if we don't talk all night, we would each know the other was there if we needed them.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have the house to myself. I get to put up my own posters on the living room walls and watch my TV shows and walk around naked if I want to. And no matter how much you may like a person, she will always have some really odd habits that you would never know about until you were living under the same roof. I never got the nerve to ask why my roommate needed five different kinds of soap in the shower at one time. And she never once commented on my obsessive-compulsive tendency to save all my sandwich bags in a pile on the counter to be washed and reused, or the bottle of mustard I dug out of the trash because it wasn't quite empty when she threw it away. The ability--no, the grace--to look the other way in the face of uber-quirkiness (or outright madness) is truly invaluable.

(Random question of the day: why does "invaluable" mean the same thing as "valuable"?)

Well, the tea's getting cold and I'm down to the bitter dregs at the bottom of the cup. I guess that's my cue to retire to my living room to ponder what poster will best compliment Sweeney Todd and Marilyn Monroe. Until later...

Ciao!
-Kay