The hidden benefits of the French press

I just discovered that my mini Bodum French press, which I'd accidentally left in my dorm's communal kitchen when I left Chicago last spring, is still down there. Now it's back up in my room--I'm just a water-heater and can of Illy away from bliss.

Aside from it being tastier and cheaper to make my own coffee than to purchase it outside, there's another advantage: privacy. How, you might ask, does buying coffee constitute an invasion of privacy?

Upon returning to Chicago, I realized that my caffeine addiction remained, but I had not yet gone looking for my abandoned French press. So, in the course of under a week, I've been to each of the 5-odd Hyde Park coffee places at which I am a regular. At one of them, I was asked if I wanted "your mocha"--how many Classics Cafe mochas has it been? Over three years' worth, that's how many. At another cafe I was asked about, among other things, my new hairstyle, the boy I'd been there with many times before, how's he doing now (well, as it so happens), and whether I'd lost weight. (As I remarked to my friend Kate, who was there but did not hear me being grilled: if I had lost weight, it was from not going to that cafe--which makes a fabulous cinnamon bun--as much as I used to.)

At the coffee shop where I got what must have been hundreds of cappuccinos during high school--the former Downtown Delicious on Greenwich in TriBeCa--my varying hairstyle was also noted, and the proprietress there also took an interest in which boys I'd been there with, making a point of telling me, unprompted, whether they'd been by recently and with whom.

I don't really think people who work in coffeeshops are invading my privacy--aside from haircuts, hairdye, and male coffee-drinking companions, I don't think I provide much in the way of entertainment--but instead that I am overly self-conscious about my coffee-related habits, and am irrationally embarrassed when they are pointed out to me.