Last week, in one of my classes, I looked around and noticed that almost everyone was drinking coffee. Whether it came from the Starbucks on-campus, or a thermos from home, everyone was just sipping and listening to the professor. I looked at my water bottle and thought, “Am I doing something wrong?” As an English major, was there some rule I missed during orientation about the need to live off of a steady diet of coffee beans and caffeine? Toward the end of class, my professor walked over toward where my group was discussing something that was definitely not about rhetoric and she started talking about coffee. I finally broke down and said, “I don’t drink coffee.”
The room was silent.
My professor looked at me with a smile and said, “drinking coffee is a lifestyle choice. You have to make yourself like it.”
And here is what she told me to do:
1. Eat Brier’s Coffee Ice Cream
She said I needed to acquire a taste for the subtle flavor of coffee. The doctor told me I needed to start liking coffee by not actually drinking coffee. I thought that was pretty funny, but she did have a point. If the taste of coffee came in the form of something I loved, i.e. Brier’s ice cream, then how couldn’t I like it? The doctor told me that, after a while, I wouldn’t even realize that what I was eating was supposed to taste like something I didn’t think I liked.
2. Start off small
After the Brier’s ice cream phase, the doctor said I needed to introduce myself to real coffee in small doses. Get the small cup with the lightest roast and put in the highest amount of sugar and creamer as possible. She said to make it taste like one of those fluffy Frappuccino drink, but without all of the whipped cream and the guilt about the calories. Once again, she was telling me to make coffee not actually taste like coffee. I was starting to wonder how I would know when I liked coffee if I had never actually really learned what it tasted like.
3. Go black
Now this one caught me off guard. She said to go from making my coffee taste like ice cream to drinking it in it’s purest form. Cold turkey. No cream. No sugar. Straight black. The doctor said that, by now, my body would like the taste of coffee, I just didn’t know it yet. She said I would take the first sip of black coffee and there would be no going back. I would be a true English major. A full-blown coffee addict. I would even have to start buying my own mugs and tumblers.
I have yet to see if this process will make a coffee drinker out of me. I am skeptical.
I guess I should trust her. After all, she is a doctor.
