I should disclaim that I lack authority to make an opinion on coffee. I'm not a connoisseur of caffeine, though I am a huge fan. Most of the coffee I have had come from big chains, and as anyone with properly trained taste buds will say, a lot of the places I frequent are horrible, consumer driven, and lack the real flavor proper coffee should have.
We can't all have cool indie-coffee houses with baristas who know us by sight and fliers near the bathroom marketing roller derby and spoken word nights. We make do with the coffee we have, and you know what? I prefer that, because now I only have up to look forward to when it comes to the beverage.
Okay, okay. Frankly, it's coffee, and it's what gets me through the day. You could be having a hard day or trying to do school work, and voila! A cup of coffee makes the time pass by, it makes the world look friendlier, brighter, and it makes you feel like a grown-up.
Hm. Sometimes, I can see how peer pressure works.
That being said, I've only been exposed to these places around where I live. Though, I will say one of the best cups I've had was in Paris, and that was only the self serve at the hotel I was staying in. It has to be the best smell I've ever beheld, granted it was following a train ride and a trip to an emergency room the first day we were there. Still, best coffee ever.
So here is a makeshift coffee index of my mind, and how I justify the five or so dollars I'll spend on a cup. I'm sorry if you think Starbucks is Sarbucks, whatever that means Negative Nancy, but dem's make a fine good brew. It hurts the heart to drink it, and I'm always sad to see it gone.
Sort of like a Titanic viewing.
As you can see from this graph, anything is better than what I can make at home. Why? Well, mostly because my coffee maker is terrible and instant just doesn't taste as strong. Coffee needs to seduce you with smell, first and foremost, and my coffee maker fails at that: it smells like tinted water, just like it tastes. But like a good boyfriend, I can't drop my coffee maker, because, well, it is there for me when I start saving money and it never did anything wrong except displease me.
The cheaper way, as my friend Judy would point out, is to quit coffee. Quit coffee, she would say, and save the money and time spent in coffee lines. And yes, while I do know that coffee probably isn't the best for you, you can't fight those benefits. Oh and don't try to tell me that coffee stunts my growth, because I'm already short.
First, when writing a paper in public, where are the best places to do it? Coffee houses with free wi-fi. Really. You get to sit there as long as you want and all you have to do is buy a small two-buck cup. That, to me, is extremely worth it when you're further down the Index. Also, per the Index, the more acceptable it is to write papers in the establishment, the further down you go. Though, the further down you go, the more pretentious you get as well, but that's if you ever have a laptop in public.
Next, coffee makes me feel responsible. Maybe it's because my order isn't a Frappuccino or something more sugar and whip cream than coffee, but I feel tremendously adult when I go to order one, especially if a gaggle of tweens just ordered a butt-load of vanilla Frappuccini in front of me. And if I have a bad day and get a cup, I feel ten times more responsible as if my life is together, and I wore matching socks or signed for a credit card bill.
Probably the biggest reason, could be this scene here, from Ally McBeal. If you don't do this, you're missing out on the best part of waking up.