When I drink boba, I think about my siblings.
My sister Lucy sticks with the classics—black, jasmine, Earl Gray—all guaranteed to be very good.
But my brother Jasper gets a little outlandish. He orders the wild, experimental drinks, like cheese and matcha yogurt with watermelon jelly—concoctions that feel like some sort of crime.
Lucy and I used to endlessly mock Jasper. We would watch intently as he took his first sip, scrutinizing his expression. More often than not, he would wince in disgust and we would laugh, our predictions vindicated. When I finally asked why he always orders such culinary transgressions, he just said, “They might be good.”
But now I’m starting to get where he’s coming from. When I would order the same familiar drinks over and over, they were always good and enjoyable. But they were only as good as I knew they were.
Now, when I order flavor combinations that feel almost wrong to say, it’s just fun.
While putting in the order, picking it up, poking in the straw, and stirring, my mind conjures this view of the drink as the most amazing drink I’ve ever had and will ever have. The excitement doesn’t even need to end well or be justified—the drink could be (and usually is) gross, but that doesn’t change how delightful it is to imagine.
The things we know are bound by their familiarity, but there are no limits to how amazing the strange unknown can be.
Philosopher David Hume said that we can’t justify our most fundamental assumption that the future will resemble the past. He would say that if you let go of a bowling ball, you can’t be certain that it will fall to the ground just because every other bowling ball has in the past. Something new only needs to happen once to change how we understand everything.
I get to experience infinite, limitless joy when ordering the craziest things, just because I don’t know. If anything could happen, I might as well assume it’ll be good!
Ajax Fu ’28 (ajaxfu@college.harvard.edu) is actually just terrible at ordering drinks.