Since this project is a memoir, I chose to create a piece based on the specific time that I gave up coffee. Throughout most of high school, I relied on coffee to get me through the day despite the fact that it made me feel jittery and sick. For my New Year’s resolution in 2015, I decided to put an end to it and vowed to give up coffee for an entire year, which resulted in a strange shift in my social interactions with people surprisingly. By giving up coffee, I realized what a central role it played in my life. I had never really noticed how often I met people at coffee shops to do homework, catch up over a cup of coffee, or receive and give coffee as a gift. I found myself constantly texting people “I can’t, sorry.” when asked on a coffee date or to meet up at a coffee shop. This phrase and the fact that I gave up coffee for an entire year became an exasperating and frustrating thing to explain to people over and over and over again.
In the piece that I made for this project, I wanted to convey the exact same exasperation that I felt when texting this phrase repeatedly. The punctuation and spacing definitely worked toward giving off that vibe. The messiness of all the different elements on the page give a careless feeling to the piece, similar to the feeling I started to have once I realized how much of my social interactions revolved around the thing I couldn’t have.
