For Whom the Flask Boils

Every morning at my house is a chemistry experiment. Well, not the mornings, per se, but the morning routine, the Making of the Coffee. There's a Florence Flask on a stand on my stove, which initially holds water. Directly attached to the Florence flask is a glass funnel, into which is fitted a filter. (And try saying that five times fast.) And poured into the glass funnel, on top of the filter, is the magic which awaits me after the end of this blog entry: coffee. The water in the lower chamber, the Florence flask, is heated, creating pressure. The pressure forces the water into the upper chamber, where it mixes with the coffee. After three minutes, I turn the heat off, and a vacuum is created in the lower chamber, which draws all the water -- now deliciously infused with coffee -- back into the lower chamber.

Or, in more mundane terms, I make coffee every morning in my Hario vacuum coffee maker. And it is, like, way cool. Even my daughter's best friend thinks so, and she's fifteen, so she ought to know cool. It's actually the coffeemaker of choice for pre-coffee-blog writers, of which I may well be the only one. And it's a lot like life.

How is it like life? I had a feeling you'd ask. I read a theory once that the universe we inhabit was incredibly easy to create, something a kid in a chemistry class might do. A kid in an advanced chemistry class. Extremely advanced. It had something to do with antimatter and inflationary bubbles, and I'll never remember exactly what it was I read, but it made the whole thing seem really simple. Something we might want our sons and daughters to grow up to do, except for the fact that there already seems to be plenty of universe out there.

Or in here, as the case may be.

And that's really the beauty of my Hario vacuum coffee maker (coffee "syphon" is the term they use) with its rounded Florence flask on the bottom. Round like a globe, like the Earth. Or like the universe, at least the universe the way most of us imagine it to be.