So first of all, let's be clear.
The use of the word 'basic' to describe anything has the same effect on me as whining and traffic. Read: I hate it with all of my capacity to hate.
Hate. It.
By definition, basic means: "forming or relating to the most important part of something." And by that definition, I love loads of basic shit. Basic clothing - simply, easy-to-wear, classic. I wear basic makeup. No crazy blue shadow on these lids, just understated nudes and maybe a metallic if I'm feeling frisky. My car is basic in terms of features and I love my car. No sunroof or heated seats, no butterfly doors, and yet still capable of getting me where I need to go and back.
However, per any website aimed at people aged 16-30, 'basic' means that you happen to like something that more than 2 part-time Urban Outfitters sales associates like. You are boring. Unoriginal. Bland. Expected and obvious. You have a penchant for small dogs and monogrammed plastic tumblers. And apparently, it also means you drink pumpkin spice lattes.
Is it any wonder then, that when I stood in the line the other day at Starbucks, waiting to order for my basic grande PSL that instead of feeling thrilled and excited that my own personal fall was about to commence, I felt... shame? Embarrassment? Suddenly I was 13 again, being dropped off at middle school in my granddad's 1980s pickup truck hoping that I could get out and disappear before anyone could hear "have a good day, sugar bug" bellowed out of the passenger side window.
What if someone saw me? Or heard? The horror.
There's no end to the shit that this delightful fall beverage has been getting online. Websites everywhere are publishing bitter diatribes denouncing them as "everything wrong with the average American coffee drinker." The first thing on BuzzFeed's list of things basic white girls do in the fall? "Get on that pumpkin spice latte grind."
Even John Oliver, my dear, sweet, perfect John Oliver has found fault with them. "The coffee that tastes like a candle," he says. In fact, he'd rather drink a "cable-knit sweater" latte than suffer a pumpkin spice.
How can I stand in line and order my favorite fall drink unabashedly if John freaking Oliver, my own cultural touchstone, declared on national television that he would be "subject to its tyranny no more."
I'm sorry, John. But what. the hell.
Consider this my shouting it from the rooftops - I love pumpkin everything. I love the pumpkin candle that Target puts out every year that has a wooden wick and sits in this cool holder with pumpkins on it. The smell of it reminds me of awesome things like cool weather and apple festivals. I love carving pumpkins and making pumpkin pie and putting pumpkin in shit that it doesn't even belong in, like bourbon milkshakes.
And I love that friggin' coffee. I love that it reminds me of the fall, and cozy things like socks. And that it's artificial pumpkin flavor helps to break me free of the oppressive, binding shackles of summer.
So stop pumpkin-shaming me, internets. And stop appropriating random words like basic and giving them stupid, linguistically useless meanings. And then arbitrarily defining random shit as not cool.
Know what I think is basic? Being a pretentious, cold-roasted, slow drip, french press asshole.
And to those of you ordering your PSL with your head down like you're some common criminal? Stand tall. Drink with pride.
You
are not
alone.
