addicted

May 2, 2006

i love coffee. i drink it daily. somehow, in college, i got a reputation for guzzling tons of it, mostly because anyone in one of my morning classses could watch me swig from a cold springs coffee cup as a fish might gasp for air. and yes, the craving still hits me hard each morning. however, i would like to dispel this notion that i drink it in large quantities, or that i ever have. i drink a cup (ok, fine, a generous cup, but one normal-sized mugful) a day, and always in the morning. i have even started to go for decaf if i want it after dinner at a restaurant (i know, i’m 70 years old).

i knew i really wanted it each morning, but i wasn’t sure whether my addiction was physical or merely psychological. now i know for sure:

while in philadelphia, i slept in on monday while my parents dutifully went to work (like normal people). my gracious father dropped josh off in west philly to take his step 2 clinical skills exam, since the site is 25 minutes from our house but just blocks from his office. upon rummaging around in the fridge, i found a glass container of coffee, which i heated up and drank*. it tasted just okay, but i wasn’t expecting a flavor sensation from the reheated stuff anyway.

i went about my business. ran 7 miles, went shopping at anthropologie for a dress for my rehearsal dinner:

wanted this, but it is sold out everywhere:

so got this instead:

(this is provided in part so that no one reading this attending the dinner will show up wearing the same thing. i mean, that would be rather silly).

anyway, that was a large but important digression. and you can see where this story is going, right? driving home from the store, i started to get a headache — a bad one. thinking i was dehydrated, i downed a bunch of water and found some advil, but the thing persisted. it got slightly less noticeable after i took some tylenol and had a beer (good combination, right?). i don’t usually get headaches, so i started fantasizing about the terrible things that could be causing it (could i have an AVM like the guy on six feet under? or maybe mine has already BURST!). of course, the answer was in the coffee: i had unknowingly served myself decaf that morning. and now i know my addiction is physical, and cannot be messed with. i have no desire to test this theory again.

* personally, i find this practice of refrigerating and reheating coffee rather sacreligious — sorry, parents. however, i wasn’t about to exert the additional effort required to brew another pot. plus, i didn’t know the proper coffee:water ratio to use, and i didn’t feel like figuring it out.

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