Coffee

Coffee is our society's default refreshment.  It is available in any restaurant.  It is available in any fast food place.  It is available at pretty much any convenience store.  Freshly brewed, hot, the only hot beverage that is readily available.  It is available in most homes.

Not mine.  I don't have any coffee.  I don't particularly like coffee.  I don't particularly dislike coffee, and there are some coffee flavored desserts that I rather enjoy.  But I don't like bitter drinks, and, even though perking coffee does smell delicious, I know that coffee never tastes as good as it smells.

I've had a weird history with coffee.  It is so widely available that you almost need to learn how to drink it (regardless of how you drink it), in order to be social in our society.  Sometimes when everyone else is drinking coffee there's simply isn't any other option.

Early on, I learned to drink coffee, on a regular basis, when I was going to theological school.  Because I was someone who had a lot of experience with shopping, and, in the house that I was renting with six guys, I was one of the ones who was doing the shopping on a weekly basis, I volunteered, at Regent, to do the shopping necessary to get the coffee supplies for the week.  Having volunteered to get the coffee supplies, I then volunteered to be the one to make the coffee every morning.  Two, two-hundred cup urns, which I filled in a bathroom bathtub (left over from the fact that Regent's facilities had previously been frat houses), and somewhat convenient to the common area where we had the coffee set up.  Because I was making the coffee, and because coffee was always available, I started to drink coffee: not every day, but much more regularly than I had.  I suppose this is an indication of how stressful I found my year at Regent.

In my early experience with coffee, I did not find that the caffeine was affecting me all that much.  In those dim and distant, carefree days of my youth, I could drink three cups of coffee, in the evening, and go to bed.  And sleep.  That is definitely not the case anymore.  Now, I have to make sure that I don't drink any coffee, or even Diet Coke, after about noon.  Otherwise I may not be able to sleep at night.

However, at that point, in my youth, it wasn't the caffeine, and staying up at night, that was the problem.  But I did find a problem.  I could, as noted, drink three or four cups of coffee and not have any particular effect.  But I found, that if I drank one cup of coffee, every day, for at least three days running, I started to have stomach pains.  So that was another reason not to drink coffee on a regular basis.

Later on, in my fifties, while I was doing the teaching internationally, there was generally coffee as refreshment, provided in the training rooms, in the venues where I was training.  I was standing up in front of a group for eight hours a day (eight *solid* hours a day) and I generally had some kind of drink on the go.  By preference it was Diet Coke, but sometimes I was drinking so much that I got tired of Diet Coke, or sometimes Diet Coke wasn't available, and so it would be coffee.  Sometimes I was drinking seven or eight cups of coffee, and glasses or cans of Diet Coke, per day.  I do remember a few times when, later in the afternoon, I would realize that my chest was practically vibrating.  This is probably due to the caffeine.

(It still didn't affect my sleep, as far as I could tell.  Mind you, in those teaching days, I was mostly running on adrenaline anyways, and I was getting by, very often, on two hours sleep a night, getting up at three in the morning and going to see whatever sites I could see on a walk away from the hotel, but that seemed to happen regardless of whether I was drinking coffee, Diet Coke, or any other caffeinated drink, or not.)

And now, following Gloria's death, and in a new place, where I am a stranger in a strange land, I am drinking coffee, once again.  I should mention Gloria's coffee.  When we first got married, Gloria was drinking a lot of coffee.  She would, of course, have coffee available at work.  But I was also (because Gloria never did mornings well), getting up when the alarm went off, going downstairs, making Gloria a cup of coffee, and bringing it back up to her bedside table, because she hadn't got up yet.  Then I would go back downstairs, and make a second cup of coffee, in between whatever I was doing downstairs in terms of preparing breakfast, and bring it upstairs to the bathroom, partly as an inducement to get Gloria up and out of bed and into the bathroom.  So, Gloria would have at least two cups of coffee, before we even had breakfast.  She drank a considerable amount of coffee.  At a certain point (and this was before she actually retired), her stomach problems increased to the point where she had identified coffee as one of the triggers, and so she stopped drinking coffee.  At that point, she was still drinking tea, but later on tea became too much of an irritant as well.  So that was the end of coffee and tea for Gloria.

As noted, I don't like coffee.  When it's the only option, I drink coffee with lots of cream, and I definitely prefer cream, not just milk, and with lots of sugar.  Actually, in terms of a creamer, or whitener, I actually prefer Coffee-Mate.  This of course demonstrates my plebeian tastes.  I find that Coffee Mate 1) doesn't cool the coffee as much, and 2) is able to ameliorate even rather bad coffee.

Of course, what I consider bad coffee, is what some people like about it.  I tend not to like dark roast coffee, as I find that it's the more bitter type of brew.  Some people absolutely adore dark roast coffee: the darker the better!  No, for me, the lighter the roast the better, in general terms.  (Although I did find, recently, when I tried it in desperation, that our local convenience store, selling only dark roast coffee, does produce something that is actually drinkable.)

I drink coffee with cream, and lots of sugar.  It's not perhaps as healthy as drinking coffee black.  I accept that.  It's probably healthier when I go and buy an enormous glass of Diet Coke (for which purpose I carry with me a ziplock bag with lemon wedges, to add at least a little bit of actual nutritional value to the fluid replenishment.  And, yes, I know that drinking coffee is not exactly a great way of doing fluid replenishment).  As I say, I drink coffee more for the social requirement than anything else, although I am finding that heavily creamed and sugared coffee can be a bit of a comfort food in certain situations, so, yes, I'm drinking coffee in reaction to stress as well.  I try and take account of the amount of sugar that I'm putting in coffee, and on days when I have had coffee I'm trying to count that in terms of the total calories that I'm consuming on my ridiculous diet.

I put a *lot* of sugar in coffee.  So much so, that, when I order coffee in fast food joints, the counter staff are all ways repeating the number back to me to confirm.  At the very least.  Sometimes the person at the till taking the order will shout the amount of sugar to the station where the coffee is being made to confirm that, yes, this is the correct amount of sugar to put in that cup of coffee.  Like I said, I don't like coffee.  I have never been able to drink black coffee.  Warm, coffee flavored milkshakes, well, that's okay, that's acceptable.  But black coffee?  Who drinks that stuff?  Well, everybody, it seems.

But not me.  As noted, when people at the order counter have always have trouble with the amount of sugar that I'm putting in the coffee.  Sometimes the confirmation of, "you want that much sugar?" goes on for several rounds.  At which point, I generally tell people that I'm a diabetic.  This usually closes the argument.  It's ridiculous, I know, and I am only technically a diabetic, and a diabetic would only want heavily sugared coffee only in some very specific circumstances.  But when I play the diabetic card, that generally ends the discussion.  The person generally looks very confused, but accepts it.