I'm more addicted to the ritualized "time-out" that coffee provides than the beverage itself.

CAFFEINE U. In the dream, I am standing in front of my class. I am fully clothed (it isn't that type of dream), and my students are attentive, polite and human (it's definitely a dream). Suddenly, a familiar melody drifts through the air. Everyone jumps up, runs to the window and begins yelling, "It's the coffee cart! It's the coffee cart!" Some of them turn to me and plead for a dollar and a quarter. One gets down on his knees and begs, "Buy me a latte, Joe! Please!" Luckily for higher education, the Liquid Bean, which is the coffee cart snuggled against the side of AOB 4, neither moves nor plays Pavlovian Pied Piper music. Of course, it doesn't need to: A constant line of people stretches in front of it. People exit Voorhies, Sproul and Olson, and move into line as if they're being reeled in by an invisible wire. It attracts the hard-core addicts, those who can't make it all the way to the MU or the Silo for a cheaper cup. First-year students often look at me blankly when I make jokes about caffeine. I think to myself, "just wait." By the third year, most students develop a familiar hooked-hand syndrome from continually bending their fingers around a Coffeehouse travel mug; it's a malady for which the student health center has found no successful treatment. I, myself, was in my second year when my roommate initiated me into the ways of the bean. Studying together in the library, we would periodically take a break. Since there are only so many Cokes the stomach can hold, I followed his example and trained myself to develop a taste for coffee. In fact, I spent my undergraduate years carefully cultivating a number of vices, like smoking--habits that I've spent the last several years trying to break. Only my coffee addiction remains, and although I periodically struggle against my dependency, I know I'll never completely give it up. Coffee has a seductive appeal because you can have it both ways. Its promise of caffeine makes people think they'll be more productive, but, paradoxically, it also offers an excuse to stop working. I'm more addicted to the ritualized "time-out" that coffee provides than the beverage itself, and with the banning of public smoking, coffee's role is more important than ever. Without it, I would be reduced to asking colleagues "do you want to sit and talk randomly about nothing important for a while because neither one of us wants to do work?" Who could accept this offer without being racked by guilt? However, "do you want to get a cup of coffee?" contains the implicit assumption that we have so much important work to do that we need to keep mentally alert. And we'll get to our important work right after we take a break. Lately, I've been able to reduce my intake to one cup a day. The only side effects have been the dreams, which, although I'm not a psychoanalyst, seem to contain fairly obvious references to my childhood of ice cream trucks and running to the window when fire trucks went by. Perhaps my subconscious is suggesting coffee keeps me in touch with my youth. Maybe the beans of Central and South America were the source of the famed fountain for which Ponce de León was searching. Or maybe I'm starting to ramble and should take a break and walk over to the Liquid Bean . . . -- Joseph Mills, Ph.D. '98