This is a repost from September 20th, 2004. The average daily traffic back then was REALLY low. So, from time to time I’m going to bring another back out, now that readership has moved beyond a bored medical student with relatively close family ties.
This weekend I told to someone caffeine was a recent vice. It was subsequently suggested my recent obsession with America’s Favorite Stimulant was less vice and more love at first sip.
What, doesn’t everyone plan their daily menu around each item’s relative stimulating effect?
History teachers would have you believe the pilgrims came to the new land for religious freedom, but could they be wrong? Is there margin for error in the historical consensus? Here’s my modest (and somewhat ridiculous) proposal: they came to the new land seeking something with a little more kick than tea. The Brits are famous for their drinking habits, aren’t they? Maybe the pilgrims were just tired of drinking the yard waste.
While I’m revising history, let us turn our attention to the Boston Tea Party. It has been said the Boston Tea Party was about taxes and choice, but maybe we’ve had the choice part just a little bit wrong all this time. Maybe they just didn’t want tea. We’ve been told our founding fathers were a savvy lot. I’ve also heard that, while they thought democracy was groovy, their trust in the unwashed masses to make good decisions was not terribly high. (How else do you explain the Electoral College?) Maybe they knew coffee was the superior caffeine delivery device, but they didn’t trust the public to make the right choice. Maybe, just maybe, the Boston Tea Party was a clandestine effort to manufacture a little more market for coffee. With Boston’s supply of tea flavoring the already polluted harbor (and making it worse), the people would have to look elsewhere for their fix; nudging them all in the right direction, so that we all might be as enlightened as our Founding Fathers.
I’ve probably written this post before, but I don’t care. My editor is on vacation this week, so this one’s going straight out – repost, new ground, correct spelling, good English, or not.
The spell checker on my phone… is unreliable. I was going to use another word, one of a few colorful choices rhyming with duck, but I’m feeling polite.
I pride myself on self-awareness. I like to think it’s one of my strengths – the silver lining to low self-esteem. The monitor runs pretty close to 24/7, so I’m usually right on top of things. Whether I cope well is another matter, but I figure I’ve got half the battle licked.
Some people say they’re morning people. Others say they’re night folks. I think it’s one thing to be a night person but a little creepy to admit it. Maybe it’s the books I’ve been reading. Well, I’m here to tell you I’m neither. I’m more of a 9 to 11a.m. kind of guy.
What does any of this have to do with today, my status, or the relative humidity in Skokie? Not much really. I just felt like sharing a random quirk, wondering if I’m as strange as I think. No, I’m beyond wondering. I’m embracing the strange today. Sorry Cheryl. At least I warned you.
I wonder if I’d find a correlation if I plotted the caffeine levels in my bloodstream during the day. I wonder if I’d find proof of a coffee fulfilling prophecy. Maybe I need to drink bigger. Maybe a thermos just isn’t hacking it.