Turns out, I'm a Genius
(Spoiler alert: Not really.)
Have you ever been so wildly impressed with your own intelligence and ingenuity that you can’t wait to tell everyone about it? Me too. All the time. I’m slowly learning, however, that most of the stuff I think that I, Marie, have discovered in my most Einsteinian displays of brilliance is, in fact, shit that literally everyone already knows.
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Most recently, I figured out that the new iced coffee lids on Starbucks’ to-go cups were conveniently equipped with a drinking hole, exactly like their regular hot coffee lids. Not, as I had suspected, a flattened, misshapen straw hole designed to discourage (aka shame) us egomaniacal, ozone-hating gluttons from attempting to push said offending straw through it and willfully destroying the earth for funsies (which I did, obviously, just out of spite). GUYS! It’s not a shame hole! It’s a DRINKING HOLE.
Mind fucking blown. Understanding both the need to discourage plastic usage and traditional straws’ inherent environmental affrontery, I’ve literally spent the past four-ish years attempting to wrangle a mealy, wet paper cylinder through this mysterious oblong hole, thinking to myself all the while, “Well they don’t have to be such dicks about it.”
Usually, I aborted the entire straw-mashing mission and just took the whole goddamn lid off, desperate to get at my caffeine sometime before I died of old age—which almost always resulted in spilling it down the front of me and spending the rest of the car trip sitting in a pond of freezing-cold ass coffee. “Those bastards,” thought I. “Those no-good coffee-gatekeeping bastards. They shall know my wrath.”
And then one day, I figured it out. The hole was for drinking (and by “figured it out,” I obviously mean “I saw somebody else do it.”). No feats of straw-squishing engineering; no spilling; no freezing-cold coffee ass. Just a direct line from cup hole to mouth hole to bloodstream. MOTHER OF GOD. I was a genius. Angels wept. Worlds awakened. Unicorns farted glitter.
And thus I began my crusade to educate the less brilliant iced coffee drinkers among us. “Did you know,” I asked breathlessly, “that you can drink directly out of that hole? Like, you don’t even have to try to fit a straw through it!”
Expressionless stares. Patronizing, bless-your-heart bemusement. Unchecked incredulity.
From
“Umm, yes?”
to
“That’s the whole point.”
to
“Do I know you?”
Anyway, friends. I am not, as it turns out, a genius. However, the light-bulb flashing, jaw-dropping wonderment to be found in discovering such elementary, life-changing truths makes me kinda glad to be an idiot. Where’s the fun in knowing it all?
Don’t ask me. I’m just a girl sitting in my car, insanely proud of my clean shirt and dry ass.