When I was in high school, the popular thing to do was grab an energy drink.
That was all I heard: Monster this and Red Bull that and Rockstar is pretty cool and so on and so forth until my head started going in circles just like anybody actually reading this massive run-on sentence is probably suffering just at this moment.
I could never figure out what was so great about energy drinks. My first boyfriend (sophomore year) had me drink a sip of something labeled “Sobe” and I started shaking all through American Studies. I tried some Monster when I was out on a (rather disastrous) adventure with my best friend and didn’t like that, either.
After all my little taste-tests, I’d finally settled on drinking nothing but Mountain Dew to get a quick energy fix – much different than my beloved characters in The TECH Project, who can’t drink Mountain Dew at all – fairly early on in high school. I held steady even throughout my senior year, when stress and tests abounded.
But all that changed when I went to college and started working at the newspaper.
I was talking about my job in the previous post, but only briefly: I work as a copyeditor at our campus paper, which is highly educational. For example, I think I now know every single way humanly possible in which to prevent H1N1, commonly known as the swine flu.
What I never mentioned, however, is that my job begins at 4 on Sundays and 6 on Wednesdays – and doesn’t end until 1 or 2 in the morning.
Now, the pay isn’t great, but bad pay is better than no pay, and I like it that I’ll have some previous employment in my major when I go to find a job. But the late hours seriously drag on me, especially on days like today when my extracurricular (and non-paid) activities mean that I’m up at 9:30 in the morning, acting as a runner til 6, then running to work where I’ll be til 1 or 2. (I was up til 2 last night as well, but that’s another story.)
So I have discovered, in the process of walking to work, that having a nice, cool, refreshing can of Mountain Dew just won’t cut it when the weather outside is 40 degrees and it’s raining.
Therefore, I picked up a brand-new habit that I know my mommy wouldn’t be proud of: drinking coffee.
Coffee is among on of the most addictive substances in the world, just after nicotine and being a rock star. While I’d much rather be a rock star than a coffee-drinker, I’m just going to have to settle for the closer-to-home of the two. But the caffeine is seriously pleasing.
However, I do have a few limits on my coffee-drinking indulgence:
- I will only drink cafe mocha.
- I will NOT drink Starbucks.
- I will only drink it when it’s raining, snowing, or exceptionally windy.
- I only buy Einstein Bros. Regular-sized Cafe Mocha, always hot and always with whipped cream.
Those probably sound pretty picky, but I have some good reasons for that.
First off, Starbucks is disgusting. Not even joking. It tastes like someone threw mud in a toaster oven, scraped off what was left behind, and brewed it into coffee. And that’s AFTER putting whipped cream on it. Ew.
Second, I only drink it in poor weather conditions because it is nice and warm, like the grown-up version of hot chocolate, which is nice.
Third, the only coffee I actually DO like is Einstein Bros. Regular-sized Cafe Mocha. I like chocolate, for one, and if I get a large the whipped cream just melts and becomes untasteable. And no one makes a good cafe mocha like Einstein Bros.
What kind of coffee do you like? Got any guilty pleasures?
