My whole life, I have despised coffee: vile, frothing cups of black sludge that look and taste like car oil but smell deceptively delicate and sweet. It smells like lies.
It is the whiff of a Trojan horse, of presidential campaigns, of that innocent look on my sister's face when she swears she didn't steal my sweater.
My hatred of coffee goes far back. Every morning when I was growing up, my father stumbled downstairs like a crazed beast, hair flying every which way with his shirt untucked and his hands reaching blindly. He was like a chimpanzee trained to only say only one word: "coffee."
"Good morning, Daddy," I said.
"COFFEE," he rumbled.
"Would you like the morning paper, some eggs or perhaps a shovel?"
"Mmm. Coffee," he said.
After bringing the evil mud to his lips in a Winnie the Pooh cup, his spine straightened like a wind-up doll, magically growing a suit and hair that lay flat. Watching him, I resolved never to shackle myself to the malevolent liquid.
Meanwhile, chains of Starbucks sprang up like pimples all over the landscape. I regarded Starbucks as an evil corporation that, even with all of its money, couldn't be bothered to invest in quality espresso brownies. It all came back to the deceiving powers of coffee: Starbucks is deceptive because for $4, you expect a quality brownie, but it tastes like a brake pad. More lies!
Taking a 9 a.m. class this semester was my downfall. How did I manage to avoid early morning classes for the last two years? This is a mystery I can hardly explain myself, except to say that I observed a religion whose only commandment was to never have class before 11 a.m.
This year, I gave way to temptation and an enticing early morning class. In order to be awake for this class, I had to have coffee. That coffee is necessary to be awake for a 9 a.m. class is insidious and suspicious. So suspicious, in fact, that it almost makes one suspect foul play.
Now I have become the swamp beast. Co-ed bathrooms are the best birth control that ever happened. At 8:30 am, with dawn barely breaking, I feel my way to the bathroom and inevitably run into a large burly shape that is probably male.
"Morning," it says.
"Coffee," I rumble.
Somehow, I manage to paw my way down two blocks and find Starbucks. As soon as I hear music and the hum of my fellow swamp beasts and smell that deceptively sweet aroma, I feel calmer.
Soon I will have my fix.
When it's my turn, I say, "A venti breve latte with two splendas, please." I love ordering at Starbucks. It's like I've mastered a new language.
"Three dollars and 75 cents," the Starbucks worker says. Is that all? They can have my soul.
In the past two weeks, I worked myself up from decaf tall to full octane venti, which, for those of you who haven't sold out yet, is Starbucks' largest size. It will be a sad, sad day when I order my coffee venti and black because I need to drink my car oil undiluted.
My mother visited last week and we went to Starbucks.
"A breve venti decaf latte with two Splendas, please," my mother said. "Easy on the foam. And for her," she continued, pointing at me, "a breve venti caffinated latte with three Splendas, with foam and whip."
It took two minutes for the workers to correctly translate and remember our orders. I knew then that I had reached a new plateau of coffee addiction.
Once a person has managed to confuse the workers at Starbucks, who are very practiced at understanding braying animals in the morning, that person knows that she has become a true coffee addict.
I fear that now there will be no turning back. My future is venti, with no room for cream or sugar.
Alexandra Toumanoff '06 is not a Dunkin' Donuts fan, either.
