To Coffee or Not to Coffee

I remember the moment I kicked the coffee. It was at our cheesily named college lounge, The Java Joint. I had been up writing some sort of paper, probably about the role of misogynistic archetypes in top 40 songs or something, and went down for a refill around 11 pm. Almost instantly my stomach cramped and kicked--for the tenth time that week. And I said, No more.

Fast forward 15 years. Yeah, I finished college, post-college, early career, even graduate school with nary a sip of the dark brew. Then this summer I thought it might be fun to try and iced coffee from the new local organic place. Organic coffee with soymilk, natch. And omg. Javatastic heaven. And almost every day since--it's now been a month or two--I've gotten my milk-chocolate colored drink. I almost never finish it and mostly nurse it all day like a bottomless bottle of whiskey. Am I in trouble? Sometimes even after a few sips I feel this not unpleasant surge of energy along my arms. My acupuncturist warns against caffeine as though it were crack, a hammer to the adrenals whose function is hampered by coffee's chemistry. But then there's the coffee-as-antioxidant argument. This summer an article about the health-related and cons of coffee topped the New York Times' Most Emailed list for weeks.

So I wonder--is this a gateway to more coffee? Am I already doing damage to my tender chi? Or am I just displacing my usual green tea quota? What's your relationship to the bean? Love, hate, addicted, hate the stuff?

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