gwax's rumblings

This morn­ing, I pur­chased a cup of cof­fee, a Café au lait to be spe­cific. What makes buy­ing a cup of cof­fee note­wor­thy is that it’s the first cup of cof­fee that I have pur­chased, or even con­sumed for that mat­ter, in about 3 years. I don’t nor­mally drink cof­fee for rea­sons that date back to my Junior year of high school.

I found high school exceed­ingly easy and, as a result, I was almost con­stantly bored. In spite of the fact that I usu­ally did my home­work dur­ing other classes so as to avoid doing it at home, I rarely slept suf­fi­ciently – a habit that I’ve car­ried with me since. The not sleep­ing meant I drank cof­fee in the morn­ings, rather a decent amount. The bore­dom, and who I am, led to exper­i­ments of all sorts. Eventually, the log­i­cal hap­pened, I com­bined my cof­fee with my exper­i­ment­ing. I usu­ally made cof­fee with our Moka Express–a phe­nom­e­nal device for mak­ing good cof­fee by the way – so that served as the plat­form for my exper­i­men­ta­tion. Mokas pro­duce rather tasty and very potent cof­fee. My first exper­i­ment involved the pro­duc­tion of three Mokas worth of cof­fee, which were then boiled down to the vol­ume of a sin­gle mug; the boil­ing down con­cen­trated the caf­feine but absolutely ruined the fla­vor. Experiment one was a resound­ing suc­cess; I was alert, wired and full of energy all day, though I did crash at the end of the day and become quite exhausted. At the time, I had a bit of a pen­chant for con­sum­ing cake frost­ing (if only I still had my teenage metab­o­lism) and I sus­pect the con­tainer I ate that day helped main­tain blood-sugar lev­els against the energy drain­ing effects of caf­feine. Obviously, my sec­ond exper­i­ment, which occurred a num­ber of weeks later, involved the same process and four Mokas; again there was cake frost­ing and it was quite a suc­cess, though I did suf­fer some jit­ters and stom­ach dis­com­fort. Worth not­ing, I esti­mate a caf­feine con­tent of approx­i­mately 200mg per Moka, with acute over­dose lev­els start­ing some­where around the 300mg range, mod­ulo tol­er­ance; hos­pi­tal­iza­tion can be nec­es­sary for as lit­tle as 2000mg. Not will­ing to be deterred, or per­haps just being a com­plete idiot, later on came exper­i­ment three: five Mokas boiled down to one cup. Experiment three was a com­plete fail­ure, per­haps there was too much caf­feine, per­haps it was a lack of cake frost­ing; what­ever the rea­son, I was done in. I couldn’t focus; my hands shook to a large degree; I was nau­se­ated to the point of vom­it­ing; it took a sub­stan­tial por­tion of my willpower to hide my sit­u­a­tion from my teach­ers and peers, even­tu­ally mak­ing it through the day, col­laps­ing in bed and sleep­ing for an exces­sive period of time.

Aside from the neg­a­tive effects imme­di­ately fol­low­ing exper­i­ment three, I devel­oped a strong psy­cho­so­matic allergy to the fla­vor of cof­fee, as indi­cated by an inabil­ity to stom­ach decaf­feinated cof­fee, cof­fee ice cream or any­thing with a hint of cof­fee fla­vor while still being able to con­sume large quan­ti­ties of caf­feinated soda. Every so often, I have tried to con­sume some­thing cof­fee related, usu­ally try­ing for very min­i­mally cof­fee options, and I have slowly found myself more capa­ble of stom­ach­ing them. Most recently, I think that I had a bot­tled Starbucks frap­pachino drink thing and was only some­what nau­se­ated by the experience.

Today, how­ever, I would say that I have only been min­i­mally nau­se­ated; to such a min­i­mal extent, I would say, that I may see about bring­ing cof­fee back into my life. My psy­cho­so­matic cof­fee intol­er­ance is a weak­ness of con­sti­tu­tion that I would really like to kick. Further test­ing is clearly nec­es­sary but I am cau­tiously optimistic.

I did make a three-layered (vanilla/strawberry/chocolate) cake but that’s not really what I want to talk about; I’m only ref­er­enc­ing it in the title and begin­ning of this post to spite Hippo, who con­de­scend­ingly sug­gested I blog about my cake. I’d far rather talk about the party I threw Sunday in honor of my recent birthday.

I can say, with­out reser­va­tion, that this was one of the best birth­day par­ties that I can remem­ber and it was all thanks to the peo­ple. The turn out was spec­tac­u­lar, includ­ing col­lege friends, high school friends I haven’t seen in years, co-worker friends and friends-of-friends (some of whom I had not pre­vi­ously met). The party was set to kick off at 3pm, with snacks, beers and even­tual bar­be­cu­ing but peo­ple didn’t start show­ing up until nearly 4pm. For a short while, the turnout seemed like it might be a bit low but then we must have hit the fash­ion­ably late turn­ing point and it turned into quite the social gath­er­ing, peak­ing at around 20 – 25 peo­ple. People were still show­ing up well into the evening and it didn’t start to dwin­dle much until about 10pm or 11pm. I can’t quite say that it went off with­out a hitch as there were cer­tainly some issues but every­thing went well in the end.

It was a great party, every­thing that I had hoped, and my thanks go out to every­one who showed up.