Coffee is important to me.

Yeah, I know, that’s the contrived type of nonsense you’d expect from a millennial. But team, haere mai, gather round:

Let us establish that American coffee is Not Good. I was a broke graduate student, but how else did they expect me to keep up with the demands of a 16 credit quarter1 and 20 hours of lab work in the crippling darkness of winter2 and avoid developing some crippling anxiety issues?  Y’all: coffee.

But I couldn’t afford the $6.90USD incl. tax Slate charged for a subpar cappuccino (“Double shot? That’ll be an extra $2.”). Excuse u gais, no. Yeah, Street Bean had a rad mission and some pretty good coffee, but it was still a greater expense than I was used to, so that was definitely a sometimes food.

So I made the switch to filter. $2 for a large Contigo of swill. It wasn’t a Good Time and I grumbled a lot, but we all have to make sacrifices.

But. When I left the US, I promised my graduate cohort that I’d continue to remind them how bad their coffee was. Thus, #coffeewatch was born.

Is it the best use of my time? No. Is it environmentally responsible? NOPE. Is it fiscally responsible? HECK NOPE. Is it particularly interesting to get badly framed snaps of my daily coffee habit? Probably not (although I can’t speak to anyone else’s lived experience).

Is it a fun way to keep in contact with friends I don’t see anymore, keep us connected, and remind them that I take time each day to think about them? Yeah, totally.

Coffee is important to me.

 

  1. Translation: lots of points ↩
  2. Yes, the sun does go down about 4:30pm in the winter at that latitude, what’s your point? ↩