We have a new rule in my classroom, proposed by a student, that my students and I fully support:
No more beverage talk.
Beverage talk is boring. If you’re telling us about your English breakfast tea or your fruity summer drink or your vitamin-infused water or your hot chocolate, you’re boring us.
Beverage talk sucks.
This goes for coffee, which I don’t drink but some of my students surprisingly do. We don’t want to hear about it. Somehow cheeseburgers and burritos are consumed with very little discussion, but when it comes to coffee, people speak about it incessantly as if it’s scintillating conversation.
It’s not.
We need more listeners in this world. If you feel the need to speak about the coffee you’re drinking, will be drinking, just finished drinking, or hope to be drinking, don’t. Make the world a better place by being a listener instead.
My students agree. They don’t want to hear their parents talk about their coffee ever again.
The same goes for alcohol, which my students don’t drink, and other than the occasional champagne toast, nor do I. If you’re talking about your alcoholic drink of choice, you should stop talking.
Beverages are not interesting
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule.
If you’re on a wine tasting adventure in the Napa valley, by all means speak about your beverages.
If you brew your own beer and are amongst beer aficionados, share your passion.
If you’re lost in the Gobi desert, your canteen nearly dry, by all means talk about water.
But unless there is something decidedly unique or apropos about your beverage, please drink it without comment. If the best you have to offer is a conversation about some past, present, or future beverage, then be a listener instead.
We need more listeners in the world
Also less damn talk about the liquids that we consume.
Of course, this rule only exists within the confines of my classroom. If you want to bore the world with your beverage talk outside my classroom, there’s nothing stopping you save your own internal filter.
