On coffee

I think it wouldn't be completely off the mark to say that 'twas coffee that was the beverage of choice in the blogging world. Well coffee and wine. Shouldn't forget the wine. Ever. Still, most of you, in reply to my question as to what makes your day or week or year, answered coffee.

Sweet, hot, caffeinated coffee.

Some of you even had the nerve to question my personal love for coffee. Tsk tsk! And made note of my supposed "oversight" in not including coffee on the list of things that have recently made my day, week, or year.

Hmph.

A place of indignation seems as good a place as any to draw a post from. So here I go.

Coffee was not on the list, because, well, coffee stopped making my day long ago. Today, coffee is an integral part of my day. Something, without which I can't really seem to be able to start my day, let alone get through it. I might as well face it, me starting an average day does not speed spell, so without coffee I don't think I would ever get as far as the shower, my bathrobe, or even the bedside table. I would just be a naked, smelly zombie, with really matted hair (as opposed to a robed, slightly odorous hermit with fokken awesome, pointy hair?). I know it is a cliche, but there really is no functioning for me without having anywhere from 2 to 10 cups of coffee every day. I'll need a minimum of one cup at least, just to tide me over the initial terror of waking up to a new day. There is, after all, so much of that light stuff around in the mornings. And birdsong. And that annoying sense of new beginnings.

Wine I can skip for a day or two, not so with coffee.

I have been known to cry if there is no coffee in the morning, and have had to quit every single attempt at detoxing I've ever made in the early stages, not because of the budding alcoholism, but because of my severe caffeine dependency.

I'm a full blown caffolic, so help me Zeus.

I'm not completely sure, but I may have mentioned coffee on this here blog before. Why yes, just a few times.

But what was the best cup of coffee I ever had?

Well, first of all, I'll have to enlighten you on my special brand of crazy coffee enthusiasm. I'm not one of those people who swear by an Italian espresso, or at the very least something that comes out of a french press. On the other hand, I don't quite consider instant worthy of the denominator 'coffee' either. I like my coffee lightly roasted, finely ground, and brewed in your run-of-the-mill coffee maker. I prefer my shots of espresso firmly drowned in the frothy milkiness of a good latte. To put it simply, I like my coffee Finnish.

I know coffee doesn't actually grow in Finland (nope, we just grow ice and santas for the world market), and I'm really talking of coffee beans that came about somewhere in south and central America, or Africa, but what matters is that they were roasted to suit the Finnish palate. And what a palate it is. Turns out, I don't get my inability to do anything in moderation from strangers.

Let me go google you some proof. Because to you, I may come off as just one completely coffee-crazed person, whilst in fact I come from a long line of coffee-crazed, very pasty, and silent folks, who very much like their coffee. We have coffee coursing through our veins. (Are you surprised that it's not wine? Because I am. Just a little bit.)

According to Frontline World "Scandinavia boasts the highest per-capita coffee consumption in the world. In Finland, people drink more than four cups of coffee a day on average."

According to International Coffee Organization, in 2007 Finland topped (again) the statistics of consumption of coffee per capita with 12 kilograms per year.

And even with all that caffeine, we still manage to be quiet and reserved. Without the coffee, we'd probably have to forgo a heartbeat entirely. One of my professors, a Dane, once asked me whether J.R.R. Tolkien really had modeled the Ents after Finns? I said I wasn't sure, but I might just have been hopped up on caffeine.

But I digress, I just thought it necessary to show you that I have, because of my cultural background alone, tested and tried quite a few cups of coffee in my time on this earth. In different countries, on different continents, in different homes and cafes, and even in a pretty good variety of different Starbucks.

And I have loved it all. Well, except for the latte spiced with spit and most airplane coffee.

I have, however, especially loved certain cups of coffee more than others:

There was that time when I was sixteen and had to stay up all night to study for an exam. I had an entire pot of coffee and indeed stayed awake the entire night. I think that caffeine high is what i have been hunting for ever since then, never quite achieving the same state of alertness. Hmm. I wonder how many brain cells I killed with that specific bender...

There was that time that I woke up with rice in my hair, caked makeup on my face, and the man of my dreams next to me in the penthouse suite of a lovely Copenhagen hotel. A little hung up, but the happiest I'd ever been. The hotel staff brought us breakfast, and that cup of coffee was something else. My first as a married woman. It even tasted more grown up.

There was that time in Cuba, driving on some back road two hours from Havana when we stopped at a zoo-like place that turned out to be a cafe also. That shot of sickeningly sweet goo the 'bartender' (that's what he called himself) called coffee and handed over to me was the best caffeine fix for years to come. I sipped it quietly while thinking that Che, whose pictures served as the wallpaper of the place, really truly was a handsome bugger, and my Zeus had he been lucky to be born an Argentine, for the coffee alone.

Then there is the coffee that I'll have with my family. With my friends. With a good book. With breakfast, lunch and dinner. With dessert. While reading a good post, The New Yorker, the obituaries in a Finnish newspaper. On the go. Lounging about. Lying by the pool. After having come in from the cold. To ease my nerves. To calm me down. To keep me awake. To help me fall asleep. To take me back. To surprise me. To make me take my mind off things. To help me focus. To make up for a bad day. To celebrate. And to quench my thirst and hunger.

Coffee really is its own food group, and possibly an emotion too.

And there really is nothing better. To quote my severely profound (not) Facebook profile: the Hubby, coffee, wine, and good books make life worth living.

At some point I should probably consider adding blogging, but to get to being that organized, I'll need a lot more coffee.