What are you looking for in your cup?
What do you suspect is hidden
at the bottom of this standardized cheap white piece of ceramics?
Is it enlightenment? Is it a break from the constant rain of work chat group messages pouring down on you?
Is it the first cup to break in your new sofa/terrace/single life?
Look, I've been looking for all of those in all kinds of drinks and foods. Outside of sex and music, food and drinks is the only thing I can superimpose with such ridiculous amount of ritual value. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to do that. I'd love to be able to see the same things in flower arrangements, physical exercise and meditation but I can't.
I've learned to taste nuances in coffee so I can adopt very nuanced psychological tricks when dealing with my coffee consumption. Today, I caught myself expecting a really impressive and bright coffee when the small specialty shop served me a lovely, muted espresso. Yesterday, I wanted a smooth, rich, warm blanket of a coffee to comfort my sad tongue. Well, I don't have such a coffee at home. Because I don't want it often enough to justify getting 250g or more of that.
When I use coffee like that to regulate my everyday life,
it feels a lot like making this drink I cherish a tool of life design. It's not enough that I have multiple social media accounts, a decorated apartment w very little inherited but many carefully selected pieces, planners and work chat groups on my phone. Sometimes, I expand that disgustingly productive understanding of self to goods like coffee, music and sex. There's a point where I strip them of the value of the labor that went into them and take away the cultural meaning generations of entire societies - or at least the people that influenced my preferences in my teen years - attributed to this little practice of pleasure.
Well it's actually not a practice of pleasure anymore. It's a caramel colored pot of viewing my life from a birds-eye-view. I'm not Forest Gump anymore. When I evaluate the acidity of a lovely drink based on the way it modifies my giornata, I'm the little feather or the camera chasing the little feather. And I don't like it.
I like coffee. The way I like stews, symphonies, rap albums and sexually bonding w my peers. Not the way I like scrutinizing my work performance. And that's because I don't like doing that at all. I do it but it turns my insides into a gooey black petroleum-like substitute of what human life actually is.
Ok, I'll draw this one boundary!
I don't like when my espressos taste like what I just described. But other than that?
Just like going to a concert or sexting with your crush. I want having coffee to be something I look forward to and something I slow down for to be in the right mood. Not something I want to control in order to control my productive functionality as an „independent individual". I know I can be really good at appreciating things the way they are when I want to. Here’s to learning to lean into the expierence of having coffee again. And find comfort in the process, rather than in control.