[ WP ] Write a heartfelt love letter to coffee .

I wrote this in China as a Peace Corps volunteer. It's mostly relevant. 
 
 Coffee Will Eventually Kill Me 
 A candid, caffeine induced self-psychoanalysis by an amateur psychiatrist 
 
 ( 5 cents ) 
 
 If you ’ re healthy, reasonably well adjusted, and slightly skeptical, you ’ re already rolling your eyes. Perhaps it ’ s the title, and perhaps it ’ s my name written just under it. Either way, you are certain that the rest of this article is composed of half-truths or just plain lies. I want to assure you that this is not the case. Unless I can profit somehow, lying is not a habit of mine. Nor is stealing or general pillaging. 
 You might wonder why I 
 mention pillaging. You 
 might. But then again, you 
 mightn ’ t. 
 Coffee has never been a tool 
 for staying awake; it has 
 always been about feeling 
 good. A good cup of French roast is almost like 
 religion in a mug. It ’ s Buddhism without the 
 hassles of meditation, reciting the four maras, or 
 remembering to shave my head. Attaining 
 nirvana is just six cups away each morning. 
 The truth is, right now I ’ m standing on a desk in 
 the English department office, dictating this to a 
 student while examining a water stain on the 
 ceiling. I forgot how I got up here and I now I 
 don ’ t know how to get down. Someone is calling 
 my waiban as I speak. 
 Seven years ago, before I was addicted, I never 
 found the urge to analyze a blade of grass in an 
 unsuccessful search for fractals. I never 
 wondered what would happen to the inhibitions 
 of female peacocks if they were given large 
 quantities of alcohol. Nor did I stay up all night, 
 hidden behind my sofa with a baseball bat 
 because I heard a noise outside. No I didn ’ t. 
 Once, using tools I ’ d invented myself, I took to 
 the streets to determine how accurately I could 
 derive pi by measuring the wheels of several cars. 
 When an owner asked me what I was doing I 
 told him that I was working on a special 
 measuring project for the government. He 
 seemed satisfied and he even gave me 100 yuan 
 if I promised not to take his car. I ran that 100 
 yuan through my French press in 3 days. 
 It was in those same streets, red-eyed on 
 caffeine, where I met Lyle “ the ” Hessian and 
 Astronaut Dan after stumbling into an illegal 
 back-alley game of majiang where, instead of 
 money or chips, people were betting chickens 
 and, instead of being surprised, I requested to 
 get in on the next round. Astronaut still teases 
 me about how many times I lost to Lyle, and to 
 this day I threaten to reveal his secret identity. 
 That usually shuts him up. 
 “ How much coffee would you like? ” the friendly 
 Starbucks barista asks me during a visit to 
 Seattle over the summer. “ All of it, ” I respond. 
 She begins to laugh, but slowly her face 
 changes when I don ’ t laugh along with her. 
 “ You ’ re serious, ” she says – more of a statement 
 than a question. She searches my hoodie for 
 bulges in the pockets – any sign of a gun or this 
 being a coffee robbery. She smiles – this time 
 awkwardly – and begins to take bags of coffee 
 off the shelf. 
 I ’ m no doctor, but sometimes it feels like my 
 heart is pumping coffee instead of blood. When 
 I look at the bottom of my French Press I 
 imagine all those little granules collecting in 
 my arteries. “ No wonder the Mormons 
 outlawed this shit, ” I say to myself as I wash 
 black sludge down the drain of my kitchen sink. 
 I think of the way my brain is always busy 
 telling me how wonderful coffee is and how 
 hard it must work to continue the deception. I 
 am sort of proud of its ability. I have a very 
 talented brain. 
 My students often say that I shouldn ’ t drink 
 coffee because it ’ s bad for my “ healthy, ” 
 information they probably learned by rote in 
 primary school along with ‘ not wearing enough 
 clothing causes colds, ’ and ‘ no pains, no gains. ’ 
 Their concerns about my caffeine consumption 
 are meant to show they care about me, and 
 have nothing to do with the deeper issue of 
 quantity. If one of my students were to try and 
 match me, cup for cup, I wouldn ’ t begin to feel 
 anything even when they started imposing 
 anthropomorphic qualities on inanimate objects 
 and trying to remember who they were, 
 exactly, while the police officer questioned 
 them about why they were burning their clothes 
 in the street. 
 Most people don ’ t understand. Why am I so 
 sensitive? Why does coffee make me decide to 
 do things that are dangerous? The answer is 
 best left to scientists who know something about 
 caffeine because the only answer I have is the 
 following: “ Why not? It makes me feel happy. ” 
 Others who understand caffeine go further and 
 ask why I don ’ t quit. Quitting is actually what 
 I ’ ve been in the process of doing for the last 
 several years. I always seem to be drinking it 
 again; I keep falling off that wagon. I ’ ve tried 
 fooling myself with decaf, taking ibuprofen, 
 tapering programs, meditation, and cold turkey, 
 all to the result of two solid weeks of massive 
 headaches and mild depression. 
 To frame mild depression, I ’ ll give you a real-life 
 example. Last year on day 3 of quitting I 
 considered jumping out of my 5th floor window. 
 The thought left just as quickly, and I never 
 thought about it again, but don ’ t you think that ’ s 
 a sign? These attacks of depression are 
 completely illogical, but very real. No amount of 
 self-talk can ward them off. 
 My adult life has been spent 
 engaging in this cyclical process of 
 quitting and starting again. I 
 haven ’ t yet learned how to do 
 “ adult ” things like apply for a loan, 
 schedule a play-date for my toddler, or get a 
 divorce. I never really “ grew-up ” enough to take 
 anything seriously. They say coffee stunts your 
 growth, but what about intellectual and 
 emotional development? I can see it now: 
 Maslow ’ s hierarchy of needs adds ‘ giving up 
 coffee ’ as a requirement for self-actualization. Or 
 maybe it ’ s the other way around. 
 People say that we have a problem with 
 something only insomuch as that thing interferes 
 with our daily life. I am a functional caffeine 
 addict, but it will likely kill me in the end. It 
 sounds macabre, but I ’ ll probably be re-enacting 
 a scene from my own life in China ( with the 
 addition of a dagger to make things more 
 interesting ), when I accidentally trip over a prop 
 dog carcass and impale myself. Don ’ t ask me 
 where I got a prop dog carcass; let ’ s just say that 
 my site-mate likes to make things. 
 Or I might try to rappel from an 8-story 
 building with 4-stories of rope while trying to 
 prove to students in the physics department 
 that the elasticity factor is sufficient to get me 
 close enough to the ground. Although my 
 most creative ideas come when buzzing on 
 coffee, my risk filter seems to be completely 
 nonworking. 
 I've often wondered if our personality affects 
 our behavior or if our behavior shapes our 
 personality. If the latter is true, coffee has 
 made me more interesting, though probably 
 less stable. I think there is a trap in that last 
 personality statement that undermines my 
 dignity as a human being, but I ’ m not going to 
 explore it further. 
 People ask if I have regrets about my 
 relationship with coffee, but different answers 
 come at different times. If one were to ask me 
 one week into quitting, I wouldn ’ t respond; I 
 would gently cry, rocking back and forth 
 grasping my head and wondering why I 
 decided to join Peace Corps in the first place. 
 Ask me in the middle of the night, at the height 
 of paranoia, and I would probably respond by 
 cutting off your head and putting it in 
 my freezer to keep it from reanimating 
 in an attempt to kill me again. So really, 
 it ’ s hard to say if I have any regrets. 
 When my parents looked me in the eye 
 and said, “ You can do anything you 
 want with your life, ” I hadn ’ t yet developed the 
 foresight to imagine myself attempting to 
 derive pure caffeine from a 2-gallon pot of 
 water and 3 pounds of Vietnamese, butter- 
 roasted beans, with the hope that I would be 
 able to snort the remains. It ’ s like that 
 commercial: “ Nobody says, ‘ I wan na be a junkie 
 when I grow up. ’ ” But at such a young age, we 
 never knew how good it would feel to be 3 cups 
 in the pot. 

