Job 33:28

Monday, November 05, 2018

day three: pumpkin spice chai latte

I was wandering through the grocery store the other day when I saw on the shelf "Pumpkin Spice Chai Latte Concentrate."

It has natural AND other flavors. 

Now- I'm not always a pumpkin spice gal- but I am a chai latte gal, and this chai concentrate was marked as $1.00.  I thought, 'for $1.00 I'm willing to try pumpkin spice chai.'

So, I brought it home, I poured myself a glass, and I latte-ed it up.  I walked into the living room and announced, "This is a pumpkin spice chai latte." 
My husband said, "You are so white."
I said, "Yup!"
I sat down and took a sip. 
I immediately questioned my whiteness.  I mean, I know what the DNA tests said and all, but this pumpkin spice thing seemed like a pretty legit test of white-middle-class-American-ness.

I wasn't passing the pumpkin spice test.
This stuff was so bad. 
It made me think that possibly everything I thought I knew about myself was wrong. 
But the crazy thing was -I kept drinking it.  I drank it to the halfway point thinking- 'Maybe it will get better,' 'I need to finish this or else I've wasted a glass of milk,' and 'This tastes like a chemical pumpkin threw up in a cup of liquid that was trying really hard to be Indian chai.'

Then- miraculously at the halfway point (maybe because some discerning brain cells and taste buds died) I started thinking, 'It's not that bad.'  'It's only as bad as regular chai concentrate.' 'Pumpkin spice, you don't un-define me!'

Then I thought, 'Wait, what just happened to me?  Who am I?  Who was I before?  Who have I become?  I certainly was not born into pumpkin spice latte concentrate.  Or was I? '

I question now if I can go through all that again for another glass.  Maybe it should be named "Emotional rollercoaster of undefining everything you ever thought you were, then turning it around and reasserting that original assessment of self, but leaving questions about self-identification pumpkin spice latte concentrate."

FYI I am a chai snob, sometimes I gotta slum it. I usually regret it soon afterward.

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