day one
25 Feb 2006There’s evil afoot in this world, ladies and gentlemen. An unholy trinity of forces that wield such power we can never hope to compete. Am I talking about the legislative, judicial, and executive branches? the three stooges?
No, I refer to the triumvirate of evil: sugar, alcohol and caffeine.
The three things I am convinced are making the majority of Americans completely miserable – either separately, or more commonly, by working together. (I base this opinion of course on my own anecdotal experience. It’s, like, totally scientific.)
I’ve done a pretty good job of giving sugar and most refined carbs the boot from my diet. Booze is another matter (ahem).
But caffeine. Whoo boy. I’ve “quit” drinking caffeine so many times I’ve got it down to a fine art (hint: Goody’s powder contains caffeine, acetominophen and aspirin. It comes in powder form for easy dosage modulation, and the painkillers take the edge off the withdrawal headache.)
Lately, my caffeine addiction has really gotten out of hand – I was going through 1/2 to a whole pot of coffee a day, plus easily 5-6 diet cokes a day at the office. Yeah, I have a problem. I was pretty much resigned to my fate – that I just wasn’t able to function in this society without being a hopeless caffeine junkie. Lately, however, my urticaria has been particularly bad, preventing me from working out as diligently (okay, at all) as I normally aspire to. In my neverending search for relief from the urticaria, I am constantly finding Some New Thing to blame it on, and then proceeding to post-hoc rationalize all the confluences I overlooked in the past. This year, it’s caffeine. I started drinking caffeine around the time the urticaria started (when I was around 15/16 – drinking a bottle of Coke at school every morning). I found some interesting articles that show that a correlation between urticaria and caffeine has been observed in others. So who knows.
Not to mention that caffeine just plain makes me feel like crap. Sure, a good caffeine buzz is great for productivity, but once you get really hooked, you wind up like Krusty the Clown, free-basing moon rocks. “All this does is get me to normal.” Meanwhile, I sleep like crap; I wake up feeling drugged, and I’m a walking zombie until I get my dose.
So, here I am, yet again, trying to kick the vile drug. I spent last week scaling down my intake, and today is my first caffeine-free day. My head hurts.