Caffeine

I tried to give up caffeine. I made it two weeks then started slipping off the wagon. My slide back into full-blown addiction was subtle at first. At first, it was just a 'sip'. Then after a few days, it became just half a cup to get me through the morning. Then a full cup to get me through the entire day. Now, I'm back to two cups in the morning. And I'll probably have a cup this afternoon, because I have a lot on my plate and it seems impossible to make it through the day without something to get my blood pumping and to keep me from taking a two-hour nap, which would seriously cut into my productivity.

I think coffee is one of those things you either love or you don't. My Mom doesn't care for coffee. She loves the smell of coffee and says that if it tasted as good as the aroma it produced she would drink it. I can understand this. If you drink it black, without doctoring it up a bit, it might seem bitter and uninviting. Unless, you are a coffee-holic like myself, then you drink it any way you can get it.

I had my first cup of coffee at my Grandmother's kitchen table when I was five. She 'doctored' it up very nicely with lots of milk and sugar. It was wonderful and I knew right away this was the drink for me. I've since had about a million cups of coffee. I can drink it black, with cream, with cream and sugar, all decked out with steamed milk and cinnamon, or combined with chocolate for a tasty mocha.

I guess you are wondering why I would even try to give up something I love so much. Well, like most things we love, we sometimes love them to excess and coffee is like this for me. I crave it. I smell it and have to have it. I'm cold on a winter day and I want to carry a steaming mug of it with me all the time. The downside of this coffee-love is that if I drink too much, I end up anxious and unable to relax. I go nine hundred miles an hour until I am completely burned out and exhausted.

Sometimes, I drink so much coffee I get heart palpitations. If I have it too late in the day, I tend to wake up in the middle of the night and can't get back to sleep. My grandmother who introduced me to coffee called this the 'big eye'. I guess she sometimes drank coffee too late in the day as well.

I think I'm going to stick with my coffee habit for a while. Besides, some recent studies suggest that drinking coffee actually has some health benefits--like lowering your risk for diabetes, Parkinsons, and colon cancer.

That's a good enough reason for me.

Until tomorrow, I remain,
Tied to my coffee maker.