Not Taking Coffee with Catherine

I don't get stalked by people too often (thankfully), but I feel as if objects, or ideas, follow closely at my heels whether I want them to or not.  One example of this is scaffolding.  Everywhere I go, it seems, there's construction or maintenance work to be done, from the area around my workplace to my own apartment building.  Sometimes I think I can walk out on a rainy day without needing an umbrella! 

Math stalked me forever.  I'm obsessively literate, and can be buried in words quite happily for hours.  Math is a means to an end.  I'm okay at arithmetic and a little light algebra, but am not thrilled by formulas and a chalkboard full of x's and y's.  The powers that be, however, decided to push me for decades towards the maths, and wouldn't let me go until I shoved the F's in their faces.  Even then, I still find the shadows of math and scientific calculators along my path. 

Now the one I find hardest to let go of, because frankly it's something I like, is coffee.  Mainly I grew up with tea, and was content with a taste of coffee here and there, and to this day I'm (glaringly) a tea girl.  Nevertheless, I've gone through periods of time, ever since I started working in offices actually, where coffee was my morning pick-me-up.  Eventually my digestive illnesses and wracked nerves would force me to give up coffee, or at least cut down.  I mean, never mind, right?  At least I can have tea!  But somehow, I'd always pick up the coffee habit.  Sometimes this came as a result of either being away from good tea, like if I'm travelling.  As I've said too many times, you can usually find a halfway decent cup of coffee out of town, but it's rare you can find even a tolerable cup of tea.  Then there's the times where I suddenly had access to interesting coffee, like when my office first got K-cups in all kinds of flavors.  Sadly, the coffee taste comes through the machine even when you're making tea, so it made sense to reach for the coffee instead.

These cycles went on, but I think at this part of my life I have to abstain from coffee entirely.  Besides the acid reflux and other 'stomach' problems, the caffeine seems to affect me even more than it used to.  I always thought I might build up a tolerance, but nope, I'm hyper-sensitive.  To be honest, I can't even drink much tea - one cup of black tea is usually the most I can take now.  If I'm really tired I might pull off a cup of green tea in the afternoon. On a daily basis, though, my second cup is an herbal infusion.

So why does coffee keep asserting itself into my life?  I entered a contest (long story), and last week I won the consolation prize - you guessed it - coffee!!!  I hear it's good, but I can't try it for myself.  Oh, and this is not the first time I'd won coffee.  Then there was the National Coffee Day a few days ago, which didn't matter too much, but it just made me aware that this drink is never far away.  I can't help seeing ads for all the autumn flavors at Starbucks - oh I used to love the pumpkin lattes.  Plus, the area of Midtown where I work is surrounded, seriously, surrounded! - by coffee places - branches of Italian, Pacific Northwest, even Australian specialty coffee stores wherever I walk.  Some of them offer tea, but only as an afterthought.  There are areas of the City that have a good amount of tea shops, but not near me, sadly.

It's been good to whine a bit about problems that don't really keep me up at night (unless I gave in....)