"Let's do coffee!"

Sometimes I wonder if I'm missing out on something by not being a coffee drinker. When someone is curled up by her window, mug of coffee twisted into her hand, watching the rain pour down, she looks happy and warm, enjoying the mood of the weather. When the non-coffee drinker is looking outside at the rain through the window, she looks crazy or depressed.

At my first temp job in Scotland I learned about how important coffee and tea were to them. I was offered coffee - "No thank you" - tea - "No thank you" - and invited to join on smoke breaks - "Coming out for a fag?" "Uh... what?" "Cigarette?" "Oh, no thank you." I got blank stares.

"So you don't drink tea or coffee?"
"No... I don't really like hot drinks."
"And you don't smoke?"
"No..."
"So what do you do? Everyone has to have a bad habit."
"Umm, I like beer?"

So I managed to keep some level of respect in my admin role due to my intake of hops, barley, malt, and water - all mixed and fermented to perfection.

I find myself a little envious of the coffee drinkers during mornings. I struggle to wake up in a natural ways, such as changing the standard beep beep (which I too often slept through) of my mobile phone alarm into a peppy song, eating breakfast, showering, generally walking to work, and brushing my teeth with intensely flavoured cinnamon toothpaste. This is all temporary and seems to be enough to get me to work by, oh, 9:30 or 10:00, but then I'm forced to sit still by myself in front of computer screen which tends to make me sleepy all over again and give me poor posture and wrinkles from squinting at the intense glare of the screen.

I also function awkwardly at "Let's do coffee sometime!" and then find myself starring curiously at a menu in a coffee establishment trying to figure out what to order. I have changed the meaning of "let's do coffee" to "let's do fruit punch". You can't really gossip and mingle over fruit punch in the way one can with coffee.

The pleasure of indulging in a warm beverage after being outside in the cold is also foreign to me. Yes, I join in on hot chocolate outings post sledding (which didn't happen this winter which is fine by me as I'm secretly scared of sledding and don't like hot chocolate that much), but that's more so for the social ritual than love of hot chocolate. Hot chocolate is generally far too hot when served causing me to flail my arms about like a penguin trying to fly. So I wait. Then I down it all in the span of four minutes while it's at a consumable temperature.

Did I mention that I once accidentally drank a glass of hot water when I was, like, 2? And by hot, it was probably actually luke warm and I completely over reacted and cried? And then spent the next six years being scared to operate the taps in the bathtub and would spend two hours playing in increasingly cooling water with wrinkly purple fingertips? The real, deep, psychological reason why I don't like coffee and other hot drinks. Oh, how the mistake of my past haunt my present self.

PS: I want to change careers to stunt car driver. More on that another day.