Zen and the Art of the Coffee Break(fast)

[iad58]

(A follow-up to aneta's story here.)

I wasn't fond of coffee in my early years; my mouth found it bitter, my nostrils acrid. By the end of high school I had only had two or three cups, and that out of courtesy, from the hands of people who liked coffee so much that it hadn't occurred to them that I might not.

During my military service I gave it another go (in hours of hardship, as in ‘since everything is against me, I'll do something against myself as well’). I discovered that I didn't hate it so much, but neither did I love it. In my first two years of college I drank coffee willingly, but not regularly. It was the natural thing to do in some situations; I did not, however, depend on it for staying awake (I seldom stayed up that late, anyway, and when I did I usually could sleep late in the morning).

Then I went to the States, and things changed. Later school hours, but more late-night attractions as well (for one thing, computer labs that were accessible 'round the clock). I figured that coffee was going to be an essential part of life, and I studied the coffee situation in the refectory. Two kinds there were, one from a machine and one of the instant variety in sachets. I tried both, and found the first too acrid in the nostrils and too bitter in the mouth; but the second kind was pleasant enough, so I made a habit of drinking it at breakfast.

It worked perfectly. No matter how late I had been up, a sachet in a cup in the morning had me wide awake and going for the rest of the day.

Everything was fine until, as on numerous other occasions, my fondness of words and letters played a wicked joke on me. I had been opening those sachets into my cup for several months without bothering with the writing on them. But one day I was tempted to read it.

It said: ‘Decaffeinated. Caffeine content not above 3%’. (Or something to this effect.)

Well, that was it. From that day on, the instant coffee no longer did anything for me. I had to switch to the machine-brewed kind, which I hated. In time I got used to it, but it wasn't easy.

The moral of the story is: The less you know, the better you sleep wake!