EGAN: Caffeine cure

Lately I’ve been feeling heavy, like a fish made of felt sluggishly navigating my way through a waterway of assignments and to-do lists. I’m pretty certain I’ve hit that mid-semester lag where whenever a professor hands me a new assignment, all I want to do is petulantly shake my head and stamp my foot.

I’ve tried to study in my room, but it’s ineffective. I hate studying in Mugar. It’s too quiet and too gray. So I generally stumble into a coffee shop. Sometimes it is Espresso Royale on campus, but usually I venture to Voltage in Kendall Square, Trident Booksellers and Café on Newbury Street or PS Gourmet Coffee in South Boston.

My affair with coffee was likely in the making for sometime, but morphed into a full-blown relationship around my freshman year at Boston University. I love the way steam pulls across the surface of a coffee cup and the way heat seeps through to warm often-icy Boston fingers.

Coffee reminds me of sitting bundled up on my porch back home, one hand cradling a mug and the other buried finger deep in my dog’s soft ruff, watching the leaves fall. If I must study or write that research paper, I might as well couple it with a good cup of coffee.

So, in an effort to get past the mid-semester doldrums, here are a few coffee shops I’ve found worth breaking that BU bubble for.

Voltage is a beautiful brick-and-mortar café that doubles as an art gallery. It has white walls that are spattered in bright blues and pinks, all colorful modernity with airy high ceilings.

The art exhibits change over about every six weeks, so there is always something new to stoke your creativity. My favorite drink, the “Paper Plane” latte, is made with cardamom, rose water and honey, and tastes like a coffee version of the Indian dessert kheer.

I like to sit near the floor to ceiling windows and watch the foreign Cambridge traffic walk by mumbling into their cell phones or dodging across the streets. The Wi-Fi is free and snacks are served a dollar a scoop from large glass candy jars. The baristas pour leaf designs into latte foam and chat about tattoos and children’s storybook art.

Although it is rare that I wander across the river, Voltage and Kendall Square are not so hard to get to and ideal for settling into an afternoon of productivity with a hint of wanderlust.

Trident is perfect for those droopy gray days we’ve been experiencing lately. Their coffee isn’t spectacular. I generally order a regular cup of black, but there is something about being surrounded by all those books that makes you feel intellectual. The small television over the bar constantly runs old movies like, “The Never Ending Story.” There is always some cute boy bowed over his MacBook and flipping through the dog-eared pages of a paperback to provide a less academic interlude. Here studying is something done as an extension of some indie film storyline. Two people hunkered over notebooks, fingers stained yellow from careless highlighting, meet eyes across the coffee bar and smile.

PS Gourmet Coffee is not about those late night sleep deprived fantasies, but about being present in Boston. This is the type of place you might throw on the obligatory I-went-to-college-in-Boston Red Sox’s baseball cap we all own. Here there are two sizes, small and “the bucket,”— which clearly shows they have the right priorities.

Latte options range from, the “Ugly Iguana,” to the “Nutty Irishman” and span a lot of candy bar like places in between. They all taste more like dessert than coffee, but are made with flavored coffee rather than added syrup.

PS takes only cash and is definitely a bit of a journey to get to, but undeniably worth it. This is the place to be for a serious cup of coffee with little fluff and definitely no Arcade Fire playing in the background. The servers all have heavy Boston accents and gel tipped nails and being here makes me feel less like a transient visitor and more like a Bostonian.

The lure of coffee is often what pulls me out of bed in the morning, and the desire for a crazy concoction from PS can be a great antidote to procrastination. Sometimes all I need to get the wheels turning is a change in scenery, a slightly delusional coffee shop fantasy and a little caffeine.

Arielle Egan is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a Fall 2012 columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at aegan@bu.edu.