It's just me. And coffee.

I think, perhaps, this is more of an autobiography compared to anything else. A little bit about me but more to towards my personality and idiosyncrasies rather than a detailed history of where I was born and when I was born and where did I come from. Life's wayy more interesting than that, don't you think?

 

And funnily enough, this idea came up to me as I stirred coffee this morning in the department kitchen.

 

Coffee has a certain scent, isn't it? Its calming and rejuvenating at the same time and its such a good place to be when you're sniffing coffee in the damn morning. Its a little sign of maturity that you're growing up as I could never really take coffee when I was a kid. When I became semi addicted to coffee when I was 15 and turning my life upside down in preparations for public exams, that was my first love of coffee. The 3-in-1 stuff. Marvellous. I would go through literal boxes of that to the point that mum and dad would have to stop buying them and I would start pestering regarding my lack of caffeine. Come to think of it, I think I lived through that year in a semi-high state. Huh.

 

Coffee has seen me through many breakfasts, random nights cramming for exams, when I got tired of green tea which is supposed to be good for me and milo just became a bit too sweet. I needed the brewing bitterness on the back of my tongue, offset by at least 2 teaspoonful of sugar. Awesome stuff.

 

Through good and bad times, as well, I might add.

 

When I got the worst job in the century working at a petrol station where they served substandard coffee, I would make myself a large mochaccino with extra cocoa sprinkles and more than enough shots of hazelnut syrup to make it a hazelnut drink with coffee rather than a coffee with hazelnut syrup. It was 5.45a.m. in the morning. Cold, wet, and the sun rose slowly. Too slowly. I wore a name tag and a yellow fluorescent jacket to pick up rubbish and unchain the trailers that people would use later that day. I filled gas bottles while customers insulted me and threatened to beat me up if I didn't fill their gas bottles even though it was expired and I legally couldn't do it. When I was more than $300 lacking in my till and I could not figure out a reason why and the BP Bitch gave me sh|t every f**king morning and the alarms went off and I couldn't turn it off and I forgot to switch on the display lights so we officially opened for business an hour late and customers came back, thumping their cups of coffee on the countertop declaring "This is the worst coffee I've ever tasted!" and the boss was so fricking biased and I had to wake up bleary eyed every morning when the alarm rang at 5.30 to wait in the cold so I could open the petrol station and customers' car wash tickets didn't work and the vacuum could not even work well enough to give me a decent b|owj0b and customers came in, demanding their money back and they had expired items and I didn't even stock the shelves and at times, I was more comfortable standing in the middle of the windy Welly winters rather than be inside because of the horrible atmosphere I had to deal with, I went back to the coffee. The sweet, sugary, diabetic causing sweetness washed everything away in a glucose-raising haze. At 2:30p.m., I would make myself a cup of coffee cash out my till and head out the door. Back to the flat. Back to sanity. Back to sleep off the sugar rush.

 

There were good times. It sounds as though my life was a horrible bleh with coffee involved. But there were good times.

 

Breakfasts with the Sociologist at various cafes, my first macchiato (Yes, N.N, this should shut you up. +D), midnight times when I would sit at my laptop and type furiously trying to finish an assignment or two or three, nights where I couldn't sleep and I was more content with sitting at the huge wooden benchtop that we had in our old flat gazing into nothing. Hearing nothing. The occasional snore, the rustling as various people woke up during the night to use the toilet. But it was just me and my mug of coffee cupped between my hands against the winter and the rest of the world.

 

I remembered the last time I consumed coffee. It was when I was living in the country for my last placement last year. I bought a container of Jarrah's cappucino with a hint of chocolate, apparently. I loved it.

 

Every morning, I would come down, bid good morning to the Brit and The Host Dad and make myself a cup of pungent, steaming coffee. It was instant stuff, of course, and coffee afficionados need not comment in shock and horror but I love the simple stuff. I would sit there and dream a little with the cup of coffee as I looked out over huge acres of land with cows turning the grass to mud.

 

Good times. That container of instant ground lasted me until I passed my exams as well the following 2 weeks later. To think of the things it saw me through.

 

So I apologise. I have plain simple tastebuds that can't tell the different between plunger, instant, vending machine, and freshly steamed coffee. Ground and different grinds only mean one thing, that there is blackish brown stuff oozing out with hot water after that I can completely taint with whole milk and heaps of sugar.

 

I'm a simple guy and I like the simple stuff. I'm not choosy. I just like coffee. In any form. In mugs, cups, tumblers, bowls.

 

And I'm such a hypocrite. Although I profess an overflowing love for it, the cup of coffee I'm sipping at the moment is my 2nd cup of the year. Whadaya know.