Coffee, Crushes and Criminals

On hiatus due to much needed escape slash holiday to Kansai (see Facebook for photo updates), Bombay & Elaine is now back with some sort of coffee-infused vengeance.

It is odd for me, the coffee thing. For the entirety of my life, since my first sip from a Beatrix Potter mug at about age eight, I have been a tea addict. Tea with breakfast, with every snack, after every meal and every drunken purge. It is the perfect hangover cure, the perfect elixir for both first dates and catch ups with Grandmothers. I can go through several pots a day; full pots which I will refill and top endlessly. My bedroom is a mess of mugs with thick brown rings down the inside. I was given the name ‘Tea Wench’ in my favourite university flat because of my consistent meddling with the kettle and the Dilmah. Earl Grey is the king of them all, followed by the Lady Grey and then English Breakfast. Herbal tea can, for the most part, shove it. I am no tea snob however; I like it strong, plentiful and, above all things, hot. Milk is compulsory, sugar is sacrilege.

And now, for the first time in my life, the dreaded beverage of coffee has all but taken over. Coffee has always been there, occasionally delicious and frequently disappointing, but never necessary. And now, at school, I find myself addicted to the god awful stuff. And it IS the god awful stuff; a jar of instant granules which look like they’re been scraped off the factory floor. In addition to this, I add a good heaped teaspoon of BRITE; some sort of hideous milk powder which revolts and obsesses me at the same time. I add it because it’s there and because the thought of drinking the stuff black makes me shudder. The BRITE drains my beverage of any sense of naturalness, turning the liquid a revolting shit brown, like the kind of paint no one would ever choose to colour their walls with.

And down the cups go; four, five, six times a day and I am addicted. Fuck. But you should see typing speed.

I have developed a crush, of sorts, on one of fellow teachers. It has taken me months to figure this out due to the fact that he is, in real life, low on the attraction scale. I think he may even have a bit of grey in his hair, although colour distinction has never been my best subject. Still, it makes me feel old. What makes the crush so interesting to me is the fact that my brain (or other organ) has become so bored and desperate that it has sought to seek out the individual with the most crush-worthy disposition in a staffroom of middle aged crowd fillers. And now, after months of thinking that I was safely off the hook, I have fallen victim to the most ridiculous crush of my life and feel like I am in The Office.

It has taken me all weeks to figure this out; this weird little allure of the Japanese man in track pants. I shall call my theory ‘The Moltisanti appeal’ and therefore lay all future copyrights. It is my belief that, if one spends enough time with a group of individuals—no matter how heinous or dull—they will hone in on the one in the group that is the most attractive, despite the fact that in real life they make ‘ewwwww’ noises and discard them with a flick of their heads. A crush must be established in EVERY collective group in life, no matter how repugnant the group is. Every high school form class, every university hall, every summer job. The situation is completely hopeless and there is nothing that can be done about it.

For those of you have watched The Sopranos (which is incomprehensively few of you considering that is a very serious contender for the best TV show ever made), you will understand my title. Christopher Moltisani, the hot headed, insecure younger cousin of Tony Soprano, is NOT an attractive person. He has an oddly shaped nose and the suspicious beginnings of a monobrow. He wears wife beaters (and IS a wife beater or at least a fiance beater; poor Adrianna) and tracksuits and hideous gold jewellery. And yet, through the many, many hours I have spend soaking up the intensity of HBO’s masterpiece; I have been sucked into crushing the little bastard. Why? Have you SEEN the rest of the males on The Sopranos? By comparison, Christopher is a regular (pre-emo band phase) Jared Leto.

I realize the absurdity of having a homosexual crush on a character in a show where the only gay character gets beaten to death. And I must reiterate that it is not a life changing crush; I don’t intend on plastering my walls with pictures of Michael Imperoili or pausing the show on scenes of him sans shirt. In fact, Christopher is perhaps my favourite character on the show (along with Janice) for completely different reasons—because he’s such a complicated, fucked up mess who was doomed from the start—but if I was to invest so many months in The Sopranos universe, I had to find someone to crush on, and thus Moltisanti it was.

And so, with my mandatory eye candy pinned, I can relax. It is simply not natural to spend that much time with a group of people, be they real or imaginary, without singling out the one you would most like to get with if the ridiculous hypothetical ever arose. Because, who knows; maybe one day it will. As I type this, my office Moltisanti has left for lunch. When he arrives back, I will smile secretly and make myself another cup of deathly coffee. Life of sorts, is sweet.