Roadrunner Twice

After returning from New York, I went ahead with my periodic caffeine purge, where I quit coffee and tea for a couple months. It used to happen accidentally on summer break, and now I do it on purpose.

Every time I do this, I get a "right on" from like two people and an "AUGH, why?" from about twenty people. And I kind of fumble around and am like "It's... just a thing I do?"

It's mostly because I'm curious, I think. About how much I rely on things, about the nature of habits, about what my body and brain are up to these days. Stuff like that.

Anyway, it's fairly easy, so why not? Mild headache for like five or six days, and then you're in the clear and you maybe learn something interesting.

(And what am I learning? Well:

• It's actually just as easy to wake up and get going in the morning, maybe easier.
• I was getting really sleepy in the afternoon for a while, but that might have been a withdrawal symptom, because it's mostly gone.
• I feel weirdly calm most of the time. That's... really nice.
• My guts seem happy I've stopped coffee. VERY happy. That is probably all the detail I should go into about that.
• Not noticing a difference in my sleep quality, because I slept well already.
• This is easier than the last caffeine purge I did, which was honestly a bit rough. Maybe the vitamin D I started taking between then and now is making a difference?

That's about it. Other than that, life without coffee is about the same as life with it, except that I miss the taste of coffee.)

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.)

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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.


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* 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.