Things have been more than a little crazy lately — went to Korea and back last week — but during my travels I’ve discovered the gross way that a caffeine addiction can sometimes force you to drink rather nasty stuff: in my case, vending machine coffee.

Does anyone know how this stuff is made? I wondered if the coffee was actually coffee, or some nefarious byproduct of a bad-for-the-environment chemical process.

Last week was the first time I drank coffee from a vending machine since high school — and back then, I pressed the cream-n-sugar button because really, I just wanted something sweet during nutrition. This time, though, I got it black, like the grown woman I am. Adulthood tastes ugly.

To top it off, Koreans drink very very weak coffee, in very very small doses, vending machine or not. I kept having to beg people for change (I didn’t have time to exchange any money), then downing double-shot-sized papercupfuls of some murky chemical fluid. All this for a lil wake-up jolt.

Yes, there were Starbucks there, and I was tempted. But the though of trying to figure out how to order a tall soy latte in Korean made my caffeine-withdrawal headache worse. And I don’t know how to say “fair” in Korean, let alone “trade.” Plus I thought that getting my fix there would be akin to — say — eating a BigMac in Paris.

I wonder if the vending machine coffee in SoCal’s as bad as the stuff in Seoul. It may be a while before my tastebuds recover enough to find out.

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