Thursday, December 08, 2005

It is early in the morning, and I am at work with my cup of drugs. My cup of TEA, that is. And even though it isn’t providing quite the same perverse jolt as Juan Valdez, I think I deserve my round of applause, standing ovation and marching band anyway. After all, this is my first official early Thursday of the school year without a latte. Yay me!

I must admit that it’s not totally sin-free. It’s English Breakfast tea, meaning caffeine still intact, christened with some half-and-half cream. I can’t stand milk in my tea, it’s travesty as far as I’m concerned, and a little richness never hurt anyone. I’ve justified the half-and-half as being carbless and therefore, Atkins friendly. What’s the major step here is the sugar free, as not even one evil granule has tainted my cup.

And what a very large cup it is. I was planning to go on and on about how much better I feel physically and mentally for having tea instead of coffee, and what a great new ritual this was going to be for me, until I made a major fuck up at Starbucks.

Understand that today is a really really really early day for me, and I am not a morning person, hence all those previous coffees. I walked into Starbucks, pleased as punch with myself for not even making puppy eyes at the newly arrived Holiday Drinks, and, all smiles, ordered, "One large English Breakfast tea, please."

Notice the slip of tongue? See for a minute there, I’d confused Starbucks with Timothy’s Coffees of the World. At Timothy’s they use plain English for their cup sizes: small, medium, large, XL. Despite “Star” and “Bucks” obviously being very plain and short words of our familiar language, the establishment likes to stupidly mix up its sizes in English, French and Italian. Or as we know them, short, tall, grande and venti. Si signor.

While large is a perfectly respectable drink size at Timothy’s, a large at Starbucks translates into Venti, which in turn translates into gynormous, absurd, and bucket-sized. If you are a regular coffee drinker of the Venti format, you have serious problems. This is what the barista gave me, and I had to stare at it for a minute or two before I realized the error was all mine, and there would be no head-biting today.

What else could I do? I took the damn thing, embarrassed as hell for carrying a hot drink so violently huge that would cause me a multitude of stares, and make me pee within the hour.

So here I sit, my almost empty pail of room temperature tea beside my laptop, cheerful red cup matching the faceplate of my cell phone, crossing and uncrossing my legs in a futile attempt to ignore the mounting pressure on the walls of my bladder. I know I have done a good thing for myself today. I have done a good thing for myself and I have done a good thing for my body, but for the love of chopsticks, this is what happens when you take my coffee away!

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