My bad friend.
I hereby announce that I am nearly two weeks into Decaf 2008, the latest in a series of attempts to reduce or eliminate my caffeine intake.
It had become clear to me that I have grown to depend on coffee’s (sometimes uncontrollable) capacity to power my brain.
Ever since I started drinking coffee (my freshman year at Rice), it has been a perennial companion.
We even threw a couple of parties—under the moniker “Devil Mug Café???—in honor of its awesome and terrible power:
Coffee giveth, but coffee taketh away. It has exacerbated my predisposition to anxiety and panic. It makes Erin not want to kiss me. And when I try to give it up, it fights back.
I’m unsettled by the degree to which I appear not to function without it.
For more than ten years, coffee has been by turns my friend (making me the best version of myself) and my enemy (making me the worst version of myself).
Its companionship is mercurial and destructive.
Erin has therefore dubbed coffee my bad friend.
(I tend think of it more as a seductress, but I can see how she might not share that characterization.)
On a related note, I am now officially looking for other, less-harmful habits to pick up. Ideally: something that will give me the feeling of inner warmth and cerebral industriousness without the unpleasant side-effects of 200 mg of caffeine. Tea is perhaps an option, but it must be reasonably decaffeinated (as anyone who was present at Pei Wei two weeks ago will attest—stupid iced green tea!).
My (non-bad) friend Jeremy has proposed “weekend coffee??? as a way to enjoy its effects on occasion without developing a mind-bending tolerance for them, but I fear I would find my bad friend on the couch long after the weekend is over.
Recidivism is a potent risk with such a strategy.
However, as the father of a three-month-old, Jeremy also offered a word of warning: once our baby arrives, I may need my bad friend more than ever.
Coffee, it is said, is the third parent.