coffee travails

See, what happened is that I FORGOT the sizes of things in middle America. I normally just order an iced coffee in the little hole-in-the-wall place with the best hazelnut coffee ever, or an iced tea at my favorite tea place, and they give me a plastic cup of iced beverage. Sixteen ounces of liquid goodness. But today I was running on five hours of sleep (because I spent more than an hour in the middle of the night trying to upload something to a class website while the school's server decided to be s. l. o. o. o. o. w. So slow that I never got it uploaded). Anyway, I wanted coffee (for the psychological benefit, as a reward to myself, because caffiene doesn't wake me up) and I wanted iced coffee (it's warm out now, so at least I have an excuse, but the truth is that I always get it iced if not an elaborate mocha concoction) and I wanted hazelnut iced coffee. I could either 1. stop at the school subway stop, leave the subway station, get the coffee, get back on the subway, and proceed to Quasi-Internship, or 2. stop at DK'd Donuts between the quasi-internship subway stop and the quasi-internship building. That's not the name of the company. But you know what I'm talking about, right - pink and orange logo? Ubiquituous donut store? Coffee is supposed to be good? DK'd is actually what the donut-stores-that-used-to-be-the-other-name call themselves in Honduras, because their franchise agreement ran out and they no longer have permission to use the other name. I always thought it hilarious. Pronounce DK'd Donuts out loud, in English, just once, and you will know why.

So I went into DK'd Donuts and ordered a hazelnut iced coffee, not too much ice, lots of milk and the lady said, "Large?" and I, having forgotten the insanity of portion sizes in this country in places where things have sizes, said, "Sure." Now I have a cup of iced coffee bigger than my head and neck put together. And maybe the rest of my body as well. Thirty-two huge ounces. I was embarrassed carrying it into Quasi-Internship, it's so big. And do you know how many packets of sugar are required to sweeten a 32 ounce coffee to my sweet-tooth standards? It's shameful. I might as well be drinking soda, I mean pop, which my former colleague who worked in Kenya for the same organization that I worked for in Rwanda told us at a regional team event has 12 teaspoons of sugar in a 333ml bottle. (Twelve. Think about that for a while and it's enough to make anyone switch to diet. Or water.) And my former colleague in Kenya knows, because his dad used to run the brewery/soft drink factory in Honduras and he worked there for a while.

Honduras seems to feature prominently, if tangentially, in this post.

I've made it through half the gargantuan cup of iced coffee in the two hours I've been at Quasi-Internship. Which is why iced coffee should come in 16 ounce cups, because that's the right amount to drink.

Also, unrelated to the coffee, I click when I walk down the hallway. Not me, myself, because that would be slightly strange, but the cuff of my left pant leg as it knocks against my shoe. This is because these nice black pants, which I bought at the Loft version of Ann T--lor and dearly love, have unraveled at the cuff seams. I tried sewing them back up. They came loose again. My mom, who actually knows how to sew, tried sewing them back up. They came loose again. Finally while I was in Detroit, I stole a whole bunch of T's big safety pins for chair covering (er, sorry, by the way) and used them to pin the cuffs. So far this works, but now they click every time I take a step with my left foot.

Argh. I have to go to the bathroom again. Too much coffee.