footpad, posts by tag: coffee - LiveJournal (original) (raw)

Off the wagon	[May. 10th, 2012|09:33 am]Footpad
[Tags**|caffeine, chocolate, coffee, mr self destruct, willpower, willpower (lack of)] [Current Mood**	grumbly]Yesterday I did something bloody stupid. I drank a cup of coffee. 108 days of abstinence down the drain.Actually that wasn't the beginning of the bloody stupid. As I get more attuned to my physiology, I've started noticing the effects of nominally milder stuff, like chocolate. Chocolate messes me around too; not as fiercely as coffee, but still plenty. It's pretty obvious that my metabolism just doesn't do stimulants, not at all, no no, and I'll do damn well to cut them out altogether in the interests of a happy life.But that was before the previous night, when I mis-timed my meals, ended up getting seriously ravenous, raided a supermarket, glutted down by the riverside on bread and strawberries and a whole hot roast chicken, and then went home via Zurich main station which has a little chocolate shop whose atmosphere is richly redolent with the scent of heaven. They do sell wrapped chocolate, and trays of truffles and pralinés and such, not to mention the inevitable Toblerones. Their main stock-in-trade, though, is piles of great raw slabs of Läderach chocolate, freshly made, sold by weight in broken-off chunks, whose intricate and mellifluous savour makes all packeted chocolate seem inadequate forever more.I bought a lump weighing a hundred grams or so, and brought it home, and ate it all, slowly. The stuff's far richer than everyday chocolate and by the second half I was struggling, but it was too good to resist.Then I got buzzed, stayed up until after three in the morning, woke up feeling weird and strange, zombied to work, realised that what I was feeling was very similar to caffeine poisoning, decided that I was kinda screwed anyway, and got myself a Milchkaffee. It seemed logical at the time.Then I got all the symptoms: a few moments of hyperventilation, a half-hour rush of delicious positive energy, needle-pains in heart and teeth and testicles, a slowly gathering sense of dazed and faintly-stoned confusion, a long evening of rather obsessive activity at work, inability to sleep, nervous awakening, and here I am facing two days of steadily intensifying exhaustion.This, I think, is the lapse that serves to remind me why _stimulants are bad mmkay._Fortunately I have an excellent excuse to break the addictive cycle immediately. I'm getting married in eight days, and no withdrawal symptom could possibly be worse than what akeela will do to me if I turn up at the wedding shambling and dark-eyed and miserable.So. No more stimulants. Seriously; no coffee, no tea, no chocolate. After 108 days, I've found that I can actually live perfectly happily without coffee or tea or even decaf.But I'm going to miss that Läderach chocolate.
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One wedding, no funerals	[Jun. 25th, 2009|10:24 am]Footpad
[Tags**|coffee, life, travel] [Current Mood**	dozy]Whoa, that was a rough one.Monday: one cup of coffee, stay up late, five hours' sleepTuesday: woke feeling exhausted, three cups of coffeeTuesday night: total insomnia, not even any desire to sleep, got lots of chores doneWednesday morning: off to work bright and early, two cups of coffeeWednesday mid-morning: sudden collapse, one hour's sleep, woke feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, two more cups of coffee, work briskly all day, go out for three beers in the evening, collapse at about 9 pm, sleep like a log for ten hoursThursday: wake up refreshed, determined not to drink any more coffee. At least not this week.÷The tone of my life recently has been a little dull, a little confused. I have bright interludes at home in Germany with Mischa and the pack. During the working week I'm in limbo: disconnected, clouded of mind. Stray has sent me a nice book on Buddhism, and I have the strong feeling that the techniques of meditation would do a lot to clear away this constant fog of busybusy thoughts.I haven't been seeing my pshrink. I don't want to break off the therapeutic relationship; I just feel that he's pointed me the way, and now I want some time to muscle through stuff on my own.On a happier note, tonight I'm flying back to England and going (via megadog's fridge) to the wedding of two dear friends. I've no idea why they're bothering getting married, since they've been together for nearly twenty years, but it's a good excuse to celebrate life in general and them in particular.
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Coffee and dogs	[Dec. 8th, 2007|04:49 am]Footpad
[Tags**|coffee, god, in-laws, mischa, religion, supper] [Current Mood**	fried]I am in the throes of the caffeine positive-feedback cycle. I had one cup (just one) two mornings ago, and of course that kept me up until 4 am the next morning, and since then I've been like all you people who think your coffee gets you through the day, when in fact it gets you through the withdrawal from your last coffee.Mischa is rapidly getting fitter. He loves this wild blustery weather as much as I do; he bounds and splashes through it with his tail up and his tongue hanging out, and when we get back we're both liberally splashed with mud. This evening we went out for so long (about twelve kilometres) that by the time we got back, akeela was tapping his foot impatiently because we were already fifteen minutes overdue for supper with his family. I tried not to look as guilty as I felt. But the supper was wonderful, and we gave his father a Klein Bottle as a pseudo-Christmas present.I just took Mischa out for a late-night walk that's practically a caffeinated-early-morning walk, and noticed a new sign on the church up the road. These signs have been annoying me lately because they facilely propose God as the answer to questions for which I think I have much better answers. With God... understand one another. Or with the extraordinary evolved capacity of human social intuition. With God... make sense of the world. This one particularly annoys me. Try science, bitches. With God... help one another. Why does this need God, grrr? But sometime in the past few days they've put up one I can agree with:With God... celebrate Christmas._Finally._I think I can sleep now
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