Café au lait, dark chocolate, skim milk.

I have my mother's drink order memorized like it's the back of my hand. (She's been ordering the same thing from the Coffee Tree since I was eight years old.) However, similar to the first time I tried taking a shot of vodka, I gagged at the taste of coffee as though I were drinking dirty toilet water. Up until the beginning of my second semester of my freshman year, I loathed the drink (coffee, I mean). Now, I swear I'm Lorelai Gilmore because I can't go through a single day without the familiar taste of liquidated bitter brown beans on my tongue and the scent of my local coffee house on my clothes.

What in the world causes college kids to become addicted to coffee as soon as they set foot on campus? Is it because we want to be aesthetically pleasing, where a cup of Joe between our palms makes each of us appear to be the quasi-hipster-indie-worldly-brooding-writerly type: a seemingly sexier, more disheveled version of the high-strung students that we actually are? Or, much more simply, is it because we students need the caffeine to survive the ever accelerating pace of existence?

Either way, coffee is fuel - the fuel that keeps us awake through the night so that we can finish that twenty page chemistry lab report or that English term paper on the symbolism behind To Kill a Mockingbird. It's the same fuel that lights the vibrant, vivacious fire to friendships and enduringly intelligent conversations. Coffee wakes up Lorelai Gilmore, but it allows me to sink deeper into myself. It facilitates discussion, laughter, and thought, and it brings old friends back together as well as new ones even closer.

T.S. Eliot once wrote that he "measured out [his] life in coffee spoons" ("The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock"). If the day that I die, the most intelligent conversations, brightest smiles, loudest laughter, most brutal all-nighters, and hardest of mornings are staring back up at me through a reflection in a mug of steaming, chocolate colored, bitter liquid, I'll know I lived life right.

So for now, I'll take a Café au lait, dark chocolate, skim milk.