Keeping Warm: the teakettle

Picture the grad student: she is a teaching assistant. She works late into the night. If you went into the teaching assistants' room, you might find her curled up and assume she'd fallen asleep over her grading, or over her reading, or in contemplation of her laptop. But then she'd raise her head in some confusion and embarrassment, because, you see, she'd been cradling the teakettle, which is so nice and warm. A stainless-steel hot-water bottle.

It's cold in the TAs' room: she's got her jacket on, and a scarf, and the old boots she just bought replacements for, but somehow has not yet stopped wearing--the boots with the big split on top that lets the snow come in direct contact with her sock (and then it's quick work to reach her foot).

"If anyone finds out I do this," she'll say, "they might not want to make tea from it anymore!" As if to embrace a teakettle is illicit--transgressive--deeply wrong. Please, reassure her--but not too effusively, or she will become suspicious.