Coffee

Is it bad to be addicted to coffee?

No. Next question.

I don't like the idea of being addicted to things. This probably sounds silly to you, since you're accustomed to reading about weekly Karaoke and daily bicycling. Honestly, though, I am strongly averse to the idea of "needing".

When I had to undergo surgery on my wrist last June, I was given the option of a variety of post-operative painkillers. Without hesitation, I asked for "the least addictive med". I am an idiot. The expensive Tylenol I was prescribed didn't do anything, and I was in quite a bit of pain for quite a while... but at least I don't have a debilitating dependence on painkillers, by jingo.

I started drinking coffee during the last semester of my senior year of college. I'd pretty much checked out at that point. However, I had a really cool class at 8am that happened to be taught by my adviser, so I really needed to bring my A game, or at least not sleep through class. Coffee to the rescue.

One morning I was running late for class. Like the Israelites fleeing Egypt, I had time to buy the coffee, but not prepare it as usual with cream and sugar. The first sip was horrible. The second sip caused an involuntary single-eyebrow raise. By the third sip, I realized that black coffee is delicious!

Sadly, black coffee is only delicious when brewed properly, and with good beans... the Student Center on my campus simply doesn't seem to be capable of such things. Even so, I was stubborn enough to drink their bilge-water coffee black for a year, because that's what a Man™ drinks, right?.

As the weather turned colder in the fall of last year, my teammate Will (whose fondness for girly drinks is well documented) started taking me on "coffee shop rides" to Starbuckses and Dunken Donuti across Central Jersey. While we were happy enough to sit leisurely in our thermal tights and shiny shoes, one can only spend so much time off the bike before the ride becomes a coffee outing with an unnecessarily long commute. Emulating Will, whose experience with such things far exceeded my own, I drowned my poor Hazlenut blend with cream, but only to cool it down to make it more rapidly consumable.

While the mid-ride coffee breaks were all selected for their high-quality brews, I was still stuck with Student Center sludge every morning. Having learned that it is okay to mask a coffee with cream and sugar, though, I've been doing so every time - and every time, I wince a little as I pour in the bland, boring cream. It just doesn't seem right.

Fortunately (for my tastebuds, not my wallet), Jenks has shown me that there is another caffeine source, and this one might not break my spirit as much as milked-down coffee. Jenks, who measures his weather in Centigrade and his velocity in kilometers, is well-versed in the Euro lifestyle, including the ever-exotic cappuccino.

For the first time in my life, I had a cappuccino on Sunday, at the Small World in Princeton. Wearing my thermal tights and my shiny shoes, and sitting leisurely in the company of some of my best friends, I experimented with this ever-so-metro beverage.

I'm hooked.