Mimi's Last Coffee

I was in the process of putting together something for my other blog, and it occurred to me that one of the issues that I was bound to be addressing was the fluidity and vagueness of language. Really, it's not just about the Bible either, but about the way people nitpick details in literature.

Anyway, many years ago, Scott McCloud had made an improvised comic strip called Mimi's Last Coffee. I say improvised because it was part of McCloud's "Morning Improv" project, in which he was taking suggestions from readers for titles and then making them up as he went along. In the associated discussion forums, some discussion broke out after McCloud published the first panel of the comic:

Somebody wondered where the story could go since this appeared to be Mimi enjoying her last coffee, and since that was the title of the story, what else was there to tell? Well, it's been at the back of my mind time and time again over the years, and I thought it would be an interesting exercise in examining the fluidity of language. The fact is, comic strip aside (although McCloud does play with possible meanings of the title in his storytelling) the phrase "Mimi's last coffee" has a near-unlimited range of possible meaning.

Starting at the end of the phrase with the word "coffee", I think a lot of people don't realize that they're dealing with a word that has so many meanings. People probably assume most of the time that "coffee" is referring to the hot brown liquid that many people enjoy with breakfast, but that's just one of a number of meanings. "Coffee" is a word that refers to many aspects of related concepts to that beverage. Coffee is a beverage, yes, but not only can it be prepared in numerous ways (Have you ever tried Turkish coffee? It's a whole different experience!) but the word refers to different parts of the process of making coffee. Starting from the beginning, there is a tree called "coffee", and it produces a fruit called "coffee". The seed of this fruit is known as "coffee", and this seed is commonly dried out and roasted to make a substance known as "coffee". The dried, roasted "coffee" is ground to a variety of different granularities and packaged as "coffee" which people buy and combine with hot water to make the aforementioned beverage. After the grounds are used, they're still "coffee" although nobody consumes them; they either thrown them away or use them for fertilizer (I think).

Being such a big part of our culture, "coffee"" is also used for a number of other concepts related to the food product in one way or another. For instance, "coffee" is a shade of medium-brown. (Mimi could be painting!) "Coffee" can also refer to the food product in a collective sense, referring to types or brands of coffee, as in, "I don't like Folger's coffee or any of the grocery-store coffees; I prefer Starbucks coffee." Actually, if you go to Starbucks or a similar coffee establishment, you'll find that they offer many different coffees. I used to work an opening shift at Starbucks, and before we opened the store, one of the things that had to be done was of course brewing up the coffee; I'd brew a pot of dark roast coffee, then a light roast coffee, and decaf would be my "last coffee". Many years before that, though, I used to have a social gathering at my house in college every week at which I served my friends coffee; such social gatherings are commonly referred to as "coffees". There may be other shades of meaning (including the idiomatic phrase "wake up and smell the coffee"), but that will do for this writing, I think.

So, how about "last"? Once again, devoid of context a person usually thinks of the word "last" as meaning "final" but I think even in that sense of the word there are shades of meaning. Someone who was going to quit drinking coffee and had a hard time keeping their resolve might repeatedly declare "This is my last coffee!" and then have yet still one more, and one more, etc. There are other senses of finality, however. Suppose Mimi were to treat two of her friends to coffees at the local cafe, and having only two hands in which to carry coffee cups, she might carry two cups to the table and then go back to the counter for her last coffee. Also, even if she is drinking her coffee alone, any particular cup of coffee might be her last coffee of the day. If Mimi were working at the coffee shop, even if she intends to come back for a drink after her shift concludes, she could very well call the final cup she serves her last coffee. If she's making coffee for herself at home, and she finds she has only enough supplies for one more cup/pot, she might declare that she has drunk her last coffee, and must go to the store for more.

Furthermore, the word "last" doesn't only carry the concept of finality, but the concept of previousness. Mimi may be enjoying a cup of coffee now, but may have a story about how bad her last coffee tasted. Or if she throws the sort of little coffee parties I mentioned earlier, and you attended one, you might hear about how things went at Mimi's last coffee. There are other senses of the word, too. Suppose that Mimi went to the cafe and found that they were serving a particular coffee blend that was her least favorite; she might declare that that is the last coffee she would ever drink, and have no coffee at all.

Finally, there is, I suppose, the question of who (or what) "Mimi" is. As I already hinted at somewhere above, Mimi need not be the consumer of the coffee, but could be the server, or some sort of host; I also implied the possibility that Mimi could be an artist painting a picture in mainly brown colors. Mimi could be a coffee grower, a coffee roaster, or a professional coffee taster. There's a chain of restaurants called Mimi's Cafe, at which I've never had a coffee, but I assume they offer it, and every day at every location there must be a last coffee served. Mimi could be a company that produces and sells coffee, and "Mimi's last coffee" could be a reference to their most recently introduced product. Mimi could be a family pet that found an unfortunate taste for coffee, unfortunate because coffee was poisonous to her and it caused her demise.

Language is a very fluid thing by necessity, and that has its good points and bad points. Namely, when you read what may appear to be a simple phrase, you can never be 100% sure that you've got a clear grasp on it, so it's best not to leap to conclusions about whether it is stating something right or wrong.

Paperless office of the mind

I was thinking last night about blogging. I was thinking about what it is that appeals to me. Thank heaven that it's not the publicity, because among the few hits I do get on this blog, the majority of them still seem to be looking for penguin sex.

See, I've always done this, even before the world wide web existed. I used to journal. You know, I'd get one of those little books with blank pages, and write whatever was on my mind in it whenever the mood took me. It even had some limited amount of readership, as I would always encourage friends who visited me to feel free to pick up a journal and peruse it. (I girl I was dating once read one cover-to-cover, which led to a few interesting conversations.) Someone once told me that largely what computer technology does is not so much make new things, but make electronic versions of things that already existed. Blogs are really electronic diaries.

But there's a difference that for me is key. I think what started me thinking about this last night was hearing someone say something like, "There's nothing scary about an empty piece of paper." I have no recollection of where I heard it or if that was anything like an exact quote. But I remembered that back in my journaling days, there was indeed something quite scary to me about a blank piece of paper.

I actually even once wrote a journal entry about it, and while I don't have it with me now, I remember it pretty well. I'd bought a new journal, and I began to write about an intense fear I had at the very moment the pen touched the paper. Here was a whole book full of empty pages, and while I tended to think those journals were overpriced, the actual value of the thing was as yet to be determined. An empty book held infinite promise, like a block of marble, waiting for the artist's chisel. It could be a book of recipes, a novel, a scientific thesis, a portfolio of sketches, an autobiography, anything was possible. However, once the pen met the paper and the writing began, all those infinite possibilities would disappear, and the result, no matter how great it might possibly be, could never possibly live up to the infinite promise of the empty page.

Of course, there's nothing rational about it. An empty page is, in a more tangible sense, nothing at all. To say that an empty page is somehow better would of course make no sense, the promise of anything without actualization is the delivery of nothing at all. Yet it stuck with me, every time I went to write.

There also was the fact that I felt since the page was a certain size, my writing had to fill it. It always surprised me how many times I ended up writing a snippet of fiction or a personal reflection that was worded so that it would just exactly fit the page size allotted. I was a slave to the physical medium of my writing.

And THAT'S what makes blogging so great. The medium of the web is pure information. There is no paper sitting there before me with the promise of anything. When I start a new blog entry, there is no space to fill: you can't scroll down the page to see the blank space below, as there is a presentation of nothing but a cursor, blinking and waiting. There's no permanence of the medium, and if I'm not happy with my writing, There's no ripping out of pages, crumpling them up and throwing them in the waste basket, there's just the click of a button, and all is gone! Or better yet, I simply can decide not to press the "Publish post" button.

There's no pressure to create greatness when nothing is being wasted but time. The internet is pure information. Our writing need not be stacks of dusty forgotten journals, our music need not be piles of CDs in cracked jewel cases, our photos are not limited by the quantity of film we can afford to buy. Hey, how many times have you seen this?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Who would bother to write that out longhand? But in an electronic medium, we toss out a page of gibberish just to fill imaginary space. Here; I'll do it again, just because I can:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There's something oddly freeing about that.

And what's my point? (Does it matter if I have one?) This blog is a journal in a sense, yes, but it is a journal that shares very little in the way of the physical properties of a "journal" as was known in the classic sense. Just as Scott McCloud wrote years ago about the idea of comics on an "infinite canvas", so all electronic forms of media have no limits in the digital world. Isn't a blog a journal with an infinite number of pages? Isn't a live webcam a documentary film of infinite length? Isn't 3D modeling sculpture with an infinite-sized lump of clay? The web allows media within it to be everything or nothing, all at once. It's exciting, but perhaps most of all, it's fun.