It's morning, and espresso machines from New York City to Dubuque, Iowa are screeching themselves awake. Accountants, scientists and flight attendants stand on top of each other in lines for double-cafe macchiatos. Soda machines plunk their wares into plastic trays for bleary-eyed high school students.
Pro-choice, pro-life, pro-Bush or pro-please-God-somebody-else-for-president, there's one thing 90 percent of Americans can agree on. Our impetus to wakefulness, caffeinated beverages (and soon, doughnuts) symbolize youth, spontaneity and dedication to hard work.
Nowhere is this more true than in graduate school, where a day at Shade Tree Coffee means more to an adviser in terms of productivity than a week of benchwork or a month of working at home. Churning out the maximum number of scholarly articles requires an extraordinary amount of coffee. Ergo, a graduate student who has never stayed up all night shaking in a caffeine-induced trance is no graduate student at all.
But I have a secret. I don't drink caffeine. Although my body is no temple (unless you count that one Bacchanalian orgy I hosted in my pants), the only thing I ever order at Starbucks is a steamed milk with almond syrup. I have a form of dysautonomia that makes drinking caffeine less pleasant than watching back-to-back episodes of "The Hills" (and that's saying something).
Every day when my labmates make their obligatory trip to the local purveyor of perk, I politely decline, citing my heavy workload and gesturing toward the delicious caffeine-free Fresca on my desk. On the rare occasions I do tag along to buy a calorie-heavy, functionally useless beverage, I burn under the indignity of ordering the equivalent of a $3 warm glass of milk.
Never in my graduate career have I written or graded papers in a furious eight-hour study session. Instead, I study in my bed so I can take naps when papers get boring. Like an elementary school kid, I pinch myself or periodically look at the sun to stay awake in class. Has a wussier fate ever befallen a graduate student?
During the tragedy that was writing my master's thesis last semester, I tried to work in a coffee shop only once, over lunch, hustling a sandwich to a couch in the back with an inconspicuous hot chocolate in a paper Starbucks travel mug. I stared at spreadsheets of numbers for an hour, but without the productivity-enhancing effects of caffeine, I was utterly sedated by the combination of hot milk and chocolate before I could do anything useful. I returned home amid unfinished projects, still uncertain as to the appeal of the coffee shop study session.
As a result, I've developed a strange paranoia that there is some big-league caffeine fraternity that meets in the back room of coffee shops all over the world when I'm not looking. I mean, without empirical verification, how do I know people aren't gathering in Twinnie's after work to worship a flying Red Bull god by offering up their breath and sanity? Just the other day I would swear I saw the barista at Shade Tree give a secret handshake to the recipient of a caramel cappuccino. And how is it, exactly, that all my friends seem to have come up with the idea of abusing Excedrin in the same month?
Despite my paranoia and failed investigatory mission, I finally came to accept my life as a decaffeinated faux grad student pansy. Perhaps I will never know what goes on behind the scenes at local coffee shops, but I don't know a lot of things, so I guess that's okay. Besides, I like studying in my bed-it's right next to the sippy-cup of vanilla soy milk I have on my nightstand.
So the next time you catch my face pressed up against the glass window of Starbucks, you can go ahead and ignore me. I'm just wondering what, exactly, you all are doing in there.
Jacqui Detwiler is a graduate student in psychology and neuroscience. Her column runs every Friday.
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