caff update

[fflo]

First 3-cup day in over a week. An accident, cuz it's free, and I had two toot-sweet first thing, so the third was already dispensing into my gorgeous-blue Baltimore Symphony Orchestra mug when I realized it was #3 & I'm trying not to do that so much.

Funny that the day I wrote of caffeine last was April 12^th. April 12^th is a caffeine-related holiday. That's right: it's not just David Cassidy's birthday. It's also the date in 1989 on which I bet Tina Randolph that I could go a year without diet Coke.

In college I had been a drinker of TaB (in addition to Dr. Pepper & Mr. Pibb), and, as a mixer with vodka, of Fresca, but when diet Coke came along (late in my sophomore year?), I became a fiend for the stuff. Just crazy. Drank at least 8 or 10 cans as many days as not. B&W-photographed a can of it centered, solitary, in the frost-filled (not -free) freezer of the dorm suite fridge, and the reverent altar feeling of the shot was no coincidence. I swear, that liquid concoction has something in it that makes you want to drink more of it. Makes you thirsty, and thirsty in particular for more of it. Tina was right to scoff at my assertion that I could give it up.

But I'd done some playing with going "off" habits during Lents, as Denise was rather into Lent, and I had a hunch I could do it. 'Sides, I wanted to. The stuff seemed evil. All that money to show how safe aspertame was, v. saccharin, and just the pointlessness of soda as a regular beverage---particularly diet pop, which is just (as I used to say) chemicals and water. (Of course, so are we, but that's beside the point.) This was before my thinking much on global economies and capitalism, but I had managed at least to pick up on the consumerism surrounding fizzy beverages.

So the winner of our bet was to win being taken to the movies by the other---catch: in any city in the U.S. of the winner's choosing. I said I'd pick New York. I said I'd even drive, and pay for the gas. (She was a student.) And indeed, I won, but we never did get it together for the cashing in. I could go on about the taste & smell of diet Coke when you're on it vs. off it, and how dangerously quickly the "off it" state reverts to the other, but I'll skip that business here. I've already gone on rather very. Let's just note that, apart from a test sip here & there, I've been off that sauce ever since.

Wonder what happened to ol' Tina. I just tried to Google her, to no avail. Tried "Bettina" and "Battina," too, it suddenly hitting me that her given name was something like that.

She was a good egg. Fun. A little buck-up(-even-if-forcédly) eager to be up/on/goofy, or something like that, and thus hard to be serious with, but that was okay. Well, there was that VERY serious time we couldn't get served in Sanders' Corner, up north of Towson---a chagrinning white privilege/ignorance realization moment for me. And she was a serious basketball player when we took on those sisters and (nonetheless) got our asses kicked, and our breasts elbowed, and our matching red T-shirts. Yoke! Zeug! That's just a little reward for any of ya'll who are still reading this stream-of-c.

Comments

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

It's all bad stuff. I say this as a person who is trying to get herself off of diet soda by cuttting it down to 1 or 2 a day. I just can't seem to do without that taste and the carbonation first thing in the morning. But I'm getting there. Of course, I've been drinking a lot more coffee at work, so I'm still getting tons of caffeine, but I figure I'll worry about one bad habit at a time.

Hell, I haven't had a drink in over a year, I haven't smoked a cigarette in at least 6 months, and I've gone back to exercising on a pretty regular basis for 3 whole weeks now even though my heel spur is killing me. If I can get myself down to 1 or 2 Diet Pepsis a day, I'm not going to worry about the caffeine habit for a while. It's kind of funny--I've almost become the "goody-two-shoes" everyone thought I was when I was younger.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

So funny to me, one of the geeks who saw you as the cool rebellious get-away-with-anything wild child, to think you were perceived (other than by teachers, maybe) as a goody-two-shoes. Anyway, if any of the negative connotations of that idea of not being baaaad are cropping up in association with being good to yourself, fie on them!

Hey, check this---after I read what homov wrote above, I snooped about for recollections of that ad campaign, and stumbled across... The Rumsfeld Connection. Guess who led the charge to get the additive FDA approval? Yup. None other. I mean, sure, there are some crackpots posting crazy shit on the internet, but there are (what at least look to be) a variety of sources citing this part of Rumsfeld's career history.

You hang in there with the good to your body stuff! I'd sure hate to be dogged by a heel spur. They sound horrible. IHope you can turn the corner on that again, somehow, without having to scuttle the momentum of working out.

[vjsmom.livejournal.com]

So funny to me, one of the geeks who saw you as the cool rebellious get-away-with-anything wild child, to think you were perceived (other than by teachers, maybe) as a goody-two-shoes.

Yeah, but you knew me in college, when my "wildness" was a lot more out in the open. Back in the early days, I managed to put up a pretty good front for the adults and that carried over with most of the kids (except, of course, for the select group that got to see me do things like pass out and puke and drive like a maniac, etc.--good times, good times . . .).

As for Rumsfeld--what can I say--he's one of the scary monsters from the box, you know.