Sitting in a café.

I'm sitting in a café here in Madison, doing a little blogging, answering my email, listening to samba music, gazing out the window at the sunlit passersby. I ordered a large cappucino. It's a 20 ounce glass, and the barista filled it half way with espresso. I've drunk two-thirds of it, and I'd have to be crazy to drink more. Is it unfair to grade exams on that much coffee? But grade exams I must, just as soon as I finish this post.

Distinct pleasure of the day: I installed a new keyboard in my iBook this morning. The space bar had broken, even though the iBook is only a little over a year old. How long can a space bar -- which operates off a single, central point -- hold up to a keyboarder who always hits it off-center, with the right thumb? Oh, several million hits, I'm sure. Waiting for the keyboard to come in the mail, I kept using the old one, needing to hit the malfunctioning space bar extra-hard to get it to take. Now having it work easily feels lovely. And the spot where the thumb hits has a nice grainy texture. Before, it was worn shiny. And the little depression in the thumb spot was palpable.

Extremely mild irritation of the morning (heightened by my caffeination): a man orders a coffee drink made with soy milk. Unless you're allergic to milk or moralistically vegan, don't order soy milk! What are you doing? Soy is a bean -- or, really, a legume. Do you drink peanut milk? Lentil milk? There is no milk, not even juice in a soy bean. So what is this soy "milk"? It's some kind of water containing tiny bean particles. That's not aesthetically correct.

Settle down now. See those exams...

UPDATE: An emailer writes: "Hel-lo! Coffee! Cocoa! ... Water with bean particles makes my whole life better, dammit." Wait! Cocoa goes in milk. But still, I get the point. And what is milk anyway? Water with -- what? Why do I favor it solely because the water has been transformed inside an animal rather than suitably boiled and then mixed with a pure powder of human manufacture? Why do I want my liquids to be something that appear in their final form in the natural state? Every other liquid that emerges from the body of an animal is something we -- most of us -- hate to drink a glassful of. The wonder, then, is that we find cow's milk aesthetically pleasing.