Turmoil, drugs, etc.

[roadrunnertwice]

What the fuck is all this noise about people backing up their journals? Russian Overlords, you're fired. Jesus.

(I don't think there'll be any catastrophic failure; just more of the steady decline of focus we've seen for a while now. I don't even expect the decline to accelerate by much. LJ will stay our happy, comfy little internet backwater for quite a while yet.)

(...Which isn't to say you shouldn't back up your journal, start blogging other places in addition to LJ, and keep track of where else your friends blog. These are all great ideas for a multitude of reasons.)

---

Over the Secular Christmas* holiday, I somehow left my** coffee grinder in Portland, and since half the fun of drugs is the ritual (and since pre-ground coffee is an abomination unto the Lord Xanthene, and also since we were snowed the fuck in for most of that time and I couldn't go get any fuckin' Batdorf), I wound up going without coffee for two weeks. Which was fine; all I had to do to avoid the withdrawal headache was ramp up my tea intake, and since my sister drinks a pot or two a day anyhow, everything worked out great.

Since then, I've noticed something: I think better on tea.

I love coffee dearly; I love the ritual, and the taste, and the culture, and the many-faceted character of the buzz. But while it leaves me full of vim and gasoline and WHOA HEY HI, it kinda fries my brain. For one reason or another, a whole pot of strong black tea leaves me more able to write, read, and make plans and/or schemes than a cup or two of decent coffee.

This saddens me a little. I know it's foolish of me, but I want to be able to do anything on any of my drugs of choice, and evidence of the impossibility of that is frustrating.

Oh well. Self-knowledge is good, and anyway, tea is awesome too.


_____
* Secular Christmas is the best of all holiday worlds: You get to visit your family and exchange gifts and celebrate Peace On Earth, AND you get to infuriate the Religious Right with all your, like, worldly ways. I'm pretty sure Secular Christmas counts as an old family tradition by now.

** It's technically family property, but I'm the one who's hijacked it at the moment.

Comments

[emmling.livejournal.com]

(a) I knew you'd have some sort of post about this. Thanks for not letting me down.

(b) I cycle through caffeinated and non-caffeinated stages. Right now I'm drinking about.... 1.5 liters of milk coffee a day, but probably sometime in the spring I'll ikinari stop and just pick up with lemon water or something. I'm on painkillers nearly constantly anyway, so I tend not to notice the withdrawal. on the other side of it, i've made myself sick by suddenly re-introducing too much caffeine into my diet. that was no fun.

(c) I like tea too.

[roadrunnertwice]

Man, the whole game of LJ Hot Potato fascinates me to no end. It's such a weird-ass service, but it keeps getting caught up in these stupid internet gold rushes. I'm no business guru, but really, if you're looking to, like, "increase shareholder value," LJ seems like a bad call from the get-go. I'd call it a better candidate for a co-op that pays fair salaries to its officers and re-invests the rest of the profits, but I don't know if that kind of operation can scrounge up Internet Gold Rush quantities of cash to buy the thing in the first place. (Or if there are even enough people willing to take full-time work as co-op officers.) Well, maybe it'll happen if the economy stays in the shitter.

And caffeine tolerance is a funny, funny thing. (Also, black tea has a special danger aaaaaaallll its own in the form of tannin poisoning. Too much coffee out of nowhere can make my heart feel weird and explodey, but I actually consider tannin nausea to be worse.)

[emmling.livejournal.com]

Too much coffee out of nowhere makes me puke. Lots.

[roadrunnertwice]

Wow, wild. I've never done that.

(And all that extra acidity, ouch. >_<)

[pantswarrior]

You know, I've cut caffeine from my daily diet these days due to concerns about my heart, and I could hardly manage any at all to begin with, let alone the kind of caffeine you get from coffee... But last year when at cons, I used to drink Diet Coke non-decaf to keep myself awake during the daytime instead of the nighttime. And I usually found myself awake, but kind of feeling unpleasant, and eventually I would either get chest pains if I had too much, or an urge to go to bed at 6pm if I didn't have enough.

Then before one con, we randomly picked up that Ocean Spray "Cranergy" stuff, cranberry juice with green tea extract and stuff to turn it into an energy drink. And there were no crashes, and no chest pains, and I had the urge to go to bed at a normal hour - and when I did, I could sleep. It was awesome.

So I'm inclined to think that tea delivers caffeine better in general.

wait cranergy wut

[roadrunnertwice]

So I'm inclined to think that tea delivers caffeine better in general.

Word. And it gets even stranger than that, because the mix of xanthenes isn't even the same—I think tea has much more theophylline in it, and maybe some other weird caffeine relatives, too. I have no problem believing that the different xanthenes and blends of xanthenes have totally different subjective effects, which is probably amplified even further by all the trace chemicals that don't even have names on 'em yet. And it probably all varies from body to body, too, because I'm sure I know people who get from coffee what I get from tea—it's not just that they have a higher tolerance, they're manifesting a totally different constellation of effects.

In conclusion: Life, tapestry, rich, etc.

[nightswatch.livejournal.com]

Tea is proof of God's love.

[boopsce.livejournal.com]

Tea touches me in a good place.

By which I mean my adenosine receptors.

[roadrunnertwice]

I've been laughing at this all afternoon, good work.

[chronographia.livejournal.com]

The levels of caffeine that non-tea beverages seem to want you to intake do, in fact, burn out your synapses. Which sort of adds to the pile of 'why tea is lovely'.

[roadrunnertwice]

Huh, really? That's news, ugh.