Why I Quit Coffee

My three prompts are chosen with the help from a Seminar project about college essays. Who knew that college essays could be so amazing? I mean any place that comes up with questions like these just makes you want to go there, or me at least.

So I guess I’ll practice a little:

1.     Why did you do it?

2.     If you were to describe yourself by a quotation, what would the quote be?

3.     What don’t you know?

By process of elimination I have chosen to answer number 1 (because I am incapable of choosing just one quote as I have learned after spending a lot of my time on brainyquote.com and if I wanted to talk about what I don’t know it could take days, possibly years.) Something awkward happened to me last year, a faux pas that one should never, ever make. When you are spoken to in a different language there is a sort of confusion that leads to unexpected answers. In my case the answer was not to say unexpected but more extremely offensive. You see strong coffee does stuff to my powers of concentration. Three shots of Spanish espresso make me into a 5’4’’ three year old. I can pay attention for around four minutes but after that my mind wanders into a land of unicorns and grilled cheese. I was stuck in that unfortunate state on my third day in Spain. It was our first day of Spanish lessons and my host grandma gave me a “weak coffee” which I later learned was probably a plot to sabotage me. We began class talking about school; he asked us what we were doing in math. I answered that I was learning about square roots and then the coffee hit me. I was completely out of it, thinking about a unicorn named Claude, which I still cannot explain, when our teacher, Jose, came up to me snapping his fingers in my face and in incredibly fast Spanish started restating the question. I thought. I caught “la historia” and to any who doesn’t understand, that means history. Naturally I thought about what we were doing in history class and said the first thing that came to my mind. All year we had been studying one thing: WWII. That is what you do in Germany. So, because I did not know how to say “Germans in WWII” I said the next best thing, “Nazi”. There was a collective gasp and a few horrified looks all of which confused me for the rest of class. It wasn’t until after that my friend pulled me aside, looked me squarely in the eye and asked, “Do you really think we are Nazis?” Appalled I said no, you learn to never ever even correlate present day Germans with Nazi’s when you live there. Unfortunately that is exactly what I had done. I learned that Jose had not asked me what we were doing in History class but really what I thought of when I thought of Germany, apparently the “historia” was to give me ideas. No one was happy with my response and I had to go hide under my bed from embarrassment. Lets just say that since that “Nazi incident” as my friends later teased me about I haven’t had any coffee.