Free Writing In Class January 24, 2008

I am kind of excited about my topic. Coffee has always been a big thing in my family. My mother basically lives off of caffeine, nicotine, and cheese. While cheese is okay it is not my favorite thing and at the time nicotine wasn’t an option (nor do I feel overly compelled to try it out now). So naturally, the only thing left was caffeine. Being able to drink coffee was a start of being “grown up” I guess. So starting from middle school I was allowed to have one cup of coffee after school. It was also good that I actually liked my coffee. Yes I am one of those people who puts sugar and cream in it. If the opportunity arises I get chocolate coffees or caramels or basically any form of liquid candy. Since then coffee has become my life source. Once I hit high school I had one cup in the morning and one after school. Sometimes I would end up having 3 or 4 cups a day. Now in college I know that is not the healthiest thing to do so I have cut back as much as possible. I try to keep it at one cup in the morning unless it is an unusually stressful day. So now getting to research coffee houses is going to be great. A major part of coffee houses is, go figure, the coffee. While doing more research I can compare the MT cup to Starbucks and point out the differences. I know there are differences because during orientation to ball state the leader told us about it. She said avoid Starbucks because it takes away from our community to give all the profits to the man. She was an interesting individual with pink hair, a lip ring and a strange fear of monkeys that she felt the need to share with us. I am also excited to look up the history of coffee houses. I wasn’t sure there would be much but I already know from looking up possible books that many people went to coffee houses to speak their minds. They were looked down upon but continued to thrive. I think it’s interesting that even with so much changing in the world it seems like the coffee house has been around and somewhat liberal for a long time. Another thing I am interested in is maybe finding why Starbucks has mostly Business people there and local coffee houses have a totally different feel to them.

So far I have stared what I call the boring work. I have looked online for the website and found one good thing. They have a map and tells what happens there. ( Live music and breakfast and coffee. ) I will go look at the place hopefully Friday, just to make sure it will work for the project but I am pretty sure it will. Tonight I will do more web searching and maybe pick up the book with the history of coffee houses.

I am also looking forward to playing with my blog a little bit. Getting pictures on might be intresting but we will see.