Silly Little Honey Lavender Oat Milk Latte (with light ice

Silly Little Honey Lavender Oat Milk Latte (with light ice)

Today is a big day. This is the 100th Wordle I' ve played! (not to be mistaken for my 100th consecutive day of Wordles- I’ ve slacked a little bit. Oops.)

Also I’ m back in Michigan for the second weekend in a row because my sister is graduating.

We woke up this morning and went out for coffee. The original plan was Bigby Coffee. But we switched it up so we could go to a coffee shop unique to East Lansing, Michigan. We were in pursuit of the “local” experience, if you will. Considering it was finals week at this semestersystem school (which was novel to me, as someone who is only half way through spring quarter), it was apparently teacher and student appreciation week for Foster Coffee, which meant that, with an ID, teachers and students could get 25% and 15% off their beverages, respectively. My sister provided her email, and I provided my UCLA ID to the cashier and we secured our 15% off coffee order.

As we walked away, though, I looked down at my UCLA ID and thought out loud to my sister (it probably (definitely) sounded pretentious and needlessly cerebral for a coffee shop at 12pm on a Friday), “ID’ s are kinda ridiculous, aren ’t they? They ’ re just a colorful card that has numbers and letters on it stating that you belong to a certain institution. ” While self- awareness of my pretentiousness didn ’t stop me from starting my thought, the shame from that awareness did stop me from continuing.

However, I continued to think,

“I just presented this ID from my California college to a cashier in the Midwest. I don ’t know her story, and maybe she ’ s seen a lot of UCLA ID’ s, but I could literally make a card that had a random barcode, a random string of numbers, my name, the name of a random (or made up) college, and a picture of me and some landmark at said college and she wouldn ’t have known the difference. Or at least, if it were me, I wouldn ’t have questioned it.

The idea that IDs and documents like it can carry so much meaning (getting you a 15% discount at a coffee shop or crossing borders) is such a wild concept if you really think about it. Here I am in this silly little coffee shop, with my silly little credit card with money you can ’t even see, paying for my silly little coffee, and presenting my silly little ID that somehow gives me the authority to ask for a silly little discount on my silly little honey lavender oat milk latte with light ice. It’ s kinda laughable.

No more than 5 minutes later, I received a notification from my family ’ s Wordle group chat: a reminder that I too needed to do it. Today ’ s Wordle? Badge.

17