Might as well face it

Greetings and salutations, mis amiguitos. I hope this morning finds you well, and I hope that the coffee finds my brain very soon or this could get messy. I've only written as Pre-Coffee Peter (affectionately known as PCP) once before, and I'm pretty sure it was even more disjointed than usual. One very good thing has already come from this paragraph though: I was going to write about something completely different but have caused myself to veer off into another direction. I love it when that happens. It makes my dwindling list of things to write about stop dwindling for a day. Today, we shall be dwindle-free.

Today's story is about my relationship with coffee. Wonderful, loveable, kind coffee. Like with many relationships, there have been some rough patches, but love conquers all. Let me start by taking you back in time. Oh yeah, did I mention that I can do that now? It's a pretty powerful tool, so I try not to overuse it.

As a child, instant coffee was always around. Even at a fairly young age, I enjoyed the taste and would sometimes have a cup of decaf while watching a Laker game with my family. I guess the real positive association started back then, sitting with my family as Magic, Kareem, Worthy, Byron, Rambis, A.C., Coop, and the rest of the crew tore up the Western conference. It was a golden era, and an awesome time to be a kid in L.A.

Once high school came around, I was drinking a cup of coffee every morning. My parents' house has a special tap in which near-boiling water comes out, and it just made the java-imbibing process way too easy. I never felt that the caffeine was having any real effect on me, and I tested this theory at times. On weekends, my friends and I would sometimes go to Denny's and split some appetizers or desserts and just generally hang out. Yeah, we were real party animals. I'd get coffee, and it quickly became a challenge to see how many cups I could have in a given night. I remember having nine one evening, and then I went home and fell asleep half an hour later. I don't know if my body was just in shock, but I wasn't even slightly jittery.

And then, one night while staying at a friend's uncle's place in San Diego during our winter break, the wheels came off. I had about seven mugs of strong coffee, and then I wasn't feeling so hot. It hit me hard, and I even felt a little pain where I think my kidneys reside. I laid on the couch all night in discomfort and hoped I'd be ok the next day. I wasn't; I was worse in fact. My head was pounding like it never had before, and I spent the next three days basically glued to the couch with my hand on my head in hopes that it could somehow relieve the pressure. I was having serious substance withdrawals.

They say that for heroin users, the ritual of preparing the drug and everything pre-use is a huge part of the actual addition. I fully understand how that can be the case. When I have a warm mug in two hands and slowly bring it up to my mouth, it's a feeling that I can only describe as comforting and right. That said, I made a decision right then and there: no coffee for six months. No regular, no decaf, none of the hot brown goodness that had brought me so much joy. Six months from that date would be my high school graduation, and that seemed to make sense somehow. After that, I would make a decision on how to proceed.

Time passed, and I handled it remarkably well. Coffee still smelled great to me, but I had no problem sticking to my guns. The hardest part was that drinking coffee had become such a part of my identity that I felt a little like a stranger to myself. When the night of graduation rolled around, I treated myself to a single cup of decaf. I had proven that I could do it, and that was my reward. Going forward, I would drink only in moderation.

During college, I started drinking a cup or two again every morning, but no more benders in the evenings. I wasn't addicted again, and I say that because I didn't have coffee on Saturdays or Sundays and got through them without any headaches. After college though, we had a coffee maker and it became an everyday thing again. I still only drank it in normal quantities, but I could feel the onset of a headache coming if I slept in on Saturday and didn't brew some joe right away.

I think that's where I am now. I drink coffee daily and love it, but I feel the effects and limit myself to a normal amount. I will sometimes have a little more in the morning or an extra cup in the afternoon if I'm particularly dragging, but I don't get crazy. I know that with a good bottle of Advil, I could stop drinking coffee again whenever I choose, but I don't see myself making that choice unless a doctor strongly recommends it. It's just too good.

Hello, my name is Peter, and I loves me some coffee. Have a great day, friends. If you have anything at all that you feel like sharing, ptklein@gmail.com is just the place to do it.

Picking favorites

I've written about several things that I like and dislike over the course of my posts here. I have opinions on topics large and small, and if I can't share them here, well then I guess I can't share them anywhere. I wanted to get a little specific on some favorites today, to let you know yet more about me and the way I think.

Let's start with an easy one: sounds. Of course, the very top of the list is sappy stuff about my wife's voice, my nephew's laugh, etc., so I'll spare you and get to a less Petercentric one. I really, really like the sound of opening a new can of coffee. I clamp down the can opener, and then the moment I start to turn the thingy, there it is. Sheeeuuuuuwm. I love it. I'm sure part of it has to do with my chemical dependency on the product it's unleashing, but it's just a cool sound, not that unlike opening a new can of tennis balls or turning on a light saber. Here's the thing though: Don Francisco coffee, which we drink every morning, changed their can types recently. The last one we bought had a pull tab on a flimsy aluminum thing instead of the normal can top. I opened it up hoping to hear the same exact sound, but it was a smaller Sheeeuuuuuwm and not nearly as satisfying. I now may have to pick up tennis (or light saber battling) to get my fix.

And now onto colors: My brother is 3.5 years older than me, so naturally I liked whatever he liked. His favorite color was red, so when asked as a little boy, my favorite color was also red. "That's my favorite color," he said, "get your own." I thought about it and chose blue, and I've been very happy with that decision ever since. I've refined it a little over the years, and I now like navy blue the most. Sky blue is very pretty for certain things too, and regular blue-blue isn't bad, but I like the navy variety. The only problem I have with navy blue is that I really have to look closely to tell which is my navy suit and which is my black one. This morning even, when my wife said her pants were navy, I leaned in closer, and she added, "Trust me." That's it though - it's a solid color. Close behind it are forest green and brick red, each a strong color in their own right. My wife and my friend Dusty both like purple the most. I don't know what color Greg likes the most, but since he's partially color blind, maybe he doesn't either. Kevin still likes red after all these years, so the t-shirts I had made for his bachelor party reflected that. Do people change favorite colors after they've chosen them in their youth? Gentle readers, what say you?

And then there are numbers. Ah, numbers. How many of you remember when you chose your favorite number? I know the exact date, actually. Here's what happened: When asked my favorite number, I said it was 5, because that was my brother's favorite number. "That's my number," he said, "get your own." I told him that it was only because I was 5 years old. "So when you turn 6, will that be your favorite number?" he asked, hoping to get me to commit to a timeframe. "Yep," I said. Like any good businessman, Kevin followed through. On my 6th birthday, he approached me and asked if 6 was now my favorite number. "Yep," I said, and it was. Exactly a year later and in exactly the same tone, Kevin asked me, "So, is 7 your favorite number now?" "No," I told him, "I liked the way 6 felt." And boom, it's been 6 ever since.

My wife's favorite number is 11, and I'm not sure why (although her birth month + birth day = 11). Greg's is 7, and he's born on the 7th. Dusty's is 12, and he's born on the 12th. Dave, who lies from time to time, has three favorite numbers: 11, 13, and 77. He says they have to do with jersey numbers from hockey players when he was growing up and nothing to do with his birthday, which happens to be 11/13/77. 5 has nothing to do with Kevin's birthday, and 9 has nothing to do with my friend Jon's, but those are their numbers. I'm proud of them for branching out. 6 is my birth month, but having heard my story, I think you'll agree that that's more coincidental than anything.

Is it strange to know so many friends' favorite numbers? Maybe, but after getting sports jerseys together and playing roulette together, it was bound to happen. It's not even close to as strange as the Timberlake wannabe on American Idol last night dedicating a song to his Grandma with "I could be the one to take you home/Baby we could rock the night alone" in the lyrics.

Got stories as to why you chose your favorite numbers? Send 'em along, and maybe you'll be featured in this week's Follow Up Friday. I know, that's heavy.

Have a good Hump Day, folks, and let's meet back here tomorrow, ok?

Measure for measure

Happy 2007, everyone. I had a lot of fun last night (I'll probably write about it sometime this week), and I'm ready to meet the new year head on. It's January 1, and the dawn of a new year gets two songs in my head. First, there's a Death Cab for Cutie song that starts with, "So this is the new year/and I don't feel any different." It's a great song on a great album (Transatlanticsm), if anyone's interested. Second, the "Seasons of Love" song from Rent that repeatedly asks the listener how he or she measures a year.

A few years ago, that song got me thinking. Since one line mentions measuring a year in cups of coffee, I decided that I would try to do that exact thing. It wouldn't serve any higher purpose, but I thought it would be cool to be able to point to a number at the end of the year and say, "That, my friends, is how many cups of coffee I had this year." Their response would probably be a mixture of "oohs" and "aahs" and requests to touch me so they could be a part of the magic.

The first day I encountered a problem with my plan was on January 1 of that year. You see, my normal coffee mug was considerably larger than a standard cup. I had to make a decision, and one that would alter the course of the entire year (and possibly human history): Do I count this as two cups or do I switch the plan from "cups of coffee" to "coffee beverages"? Tough call, I know, and I pondered it for at least five seconds. After those five seconds were up, I made a decision: I would count my morning coffee as two cups. That way, I could stay true to the song and I could also pad my stats a little in the process. I realize that seems petty, but if anyone else was doing the same thing, I wanted to win.

The second problem occurred less than a week later. It was the afternoon of a workday, and I went to fill up my big mug with some more coffee for the afternoon. I didn't want too much caffeine though, so I did half regular and half decaf. Then I realized that I had never thought about whether I was keeping track of all cups of coffee or just caffeinated ones. I think this is where my plan fell apart. I decided to only count the caffeinated ones, mainly because those were the cups of coffee with a real purpose. Cups of decaf are like seat holders at the Oscars: they're physically there, but they're not nearly as special as what they're taking the place of.

I was closing in on 40 cups of coffee around the 15th of the month when I noticed a problem. I found that I kept getting two additional cups in the afternoon for the sole purpose of counting them. I was making myself finish my coffee so I could count it, regardless of how shaky I may have been from the already-high levels of caffeine in my system. It seemed this measuring was making my coffee habit significantly more pronounced, and that wasn't a good thing. So I quit. Counting, that is. I kept drinking coffee, but wanted to stop keeping a mental record of it. This was proving to be more difficult than I first thought.

I'm an odd guy, and I find that I subconsciously count things from time to time. For example, a car alarm may be going off, and I'll notice after a little while that the voice in my head will be saying, "32, 33, 34." That same voice counts stairs and sometimes even regular walking steps. So I was having a lot of trouble not counting my cups of coffee. I found a solution by playing to one of my weaknesses: math. What's one and three-fourths plus one half plus one and one-third? I can do it with paper, but over the course of a couple of days, the fractions got confusing and I totally stopped recording them in my head. Take that, me.

So, I didn't get even one-twelfth of the way to my goal before quitting. (Yes, I can do that math.) I don't mind though; it was probably a stupid thing to try in the first place. I doubt the Rent lyricist really expected anyone to do that, because who in their right mind really keeps track of something as trivial as cups of coffee over the course of an entire year? Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to take my first shit of 07. Happy New Year!