I flirt with dark forces!

Over the past few months I've been allowing myself to use limited amounts of caffeine on a limited basis for specific purposes. That's fine; my goal was never to eliminate all caffeine from my life forever, simply to get it well, well under control. Over the past few weeks, though, I've been allowing my caffeine consumption to steadily climb. It's not crazy or anything, no more than probably 1-4 shots a day, but the trend is clear and needs to be countered. I'm giving myself another week or so to reach the end of the current project and then I'm throttling caffeine for a while.

Also, last night I bought a french coffee press from a drivethru window. That fact amuses me greatly.

Also, I've begun to feel weirdly nauseous over the past fifteen minutes or so. This fact is (presumably) unrelated to the above, but what the hell.

Just woke up. Slept for something like eleven hours. Brieann woke me up an hour ago, and I didn't even realize how long I'd been asleep for -- I thought she was waking me up early. Fell back asleep for an hour. Here I am.

Something I've noticed since going off of caffeine is that I require a pretty solid eight hours of sleep a night. That's completely alien to me. I used to average 4-6 hours of sleep a day, almost every day. For years and years. My body is pretty similar to my dad's in most respects. He's a lifelong coffee drinker and he averages maybe 4-5 hours a day. But now, I get 4-6 hours for a couple of days in a row, and I'm out like a light on the third. Wow.

Nor does it help that I seem to be functioning along some sort of 26-hour day. I am slowly but surely becoming completely nocturnal. I'm sure that my schedule will keep migrating until, in a few months, I'm completely diurnal. Weird.

I have less energy as well. This, I think, is the result of years and years of caffeine dependence. I have faith, though. I had an enormous amount of energy as a child and as a teenager -- far, far, far, far, far more than most others my age. Honestly, you have no idea. I'm older now, of course, so I don't know if I'll ever get back to quite those levels, but I do believe I'll develop a still significant amount of natural energy. When I first quit caffeine I was almost completely lethargic. Slowly but surely, as my body heals itself and learns to stand on its own, as it were, I'm recovering some of that old energy.

Could probably stand to improve my diet, too. There are worse, but there are certainly better.

I'm sitting around, working at home, enjoying a cup of freshly-brewed decaf, listening to some bjork, and I take a break to check ars technica. I am a good technocrat, and I am rewarded for it. An article on xmlstarlet, a command-line xml manipulation tool. Hey, I hadn't heard about that, and that sounds plenty cool (and handy) -- I've been wanting something like that for a while. I check fink and -- lo and behold! -- there's already an OS X port of it. Awesome! Oh, and hey, here's an article on Open Source Mac, a directory highlighting some of the best OS apps for OS X. Most of the stuff there isn't new to me, but there are a few surprises, and it looks like some apps I abandoned a while ago have come a long way. Outstanding! Wait, there's AbiWord -- I haven't used it for years, and here it is, polished and clean and ready for OS X. Spectacular! Oh my god, that's wonderful, I've been looking for a good open-source word processor for a long time and of course I should've thought to try AbiWord but I was underwhelmed when I tried it on linux but now it looks like it's come so far, and it may be perfect for my needs and oh my god look there's a Cocoa del.icio.us client and oh my god life is so awesome!

Life is wonderful! Life is love! I've never felt so alive, so excited about software! I've never felt this way about software!

Wait a minute. I've never felt this way about software. It's not just cool, I'm having a fucking chemical reaction to it. What the hell???

No. No, it couldn't be.

I check the trash and pull out the coffee package.

It is. I've been drinking caffeinated coffee.



This is bizarre. One of the reasons I gave up caffeine in July was because I simply couldn't feel the effects of it anymore. I hadn't noticed the effects of it for years. All I noticed was what happened when I stopped drinking it. So I quit, and the process was, all things considered, pretty smooth. I haven't eliminated all caffeine from my diet -- that's virtually impossible to do in this society -- but I've ingested only minimal amounts. A little bit in a piece of chocolate, a little bit in a jack and coke, things like that. Once or twice I got a cup of caffeinated coffee to keep me sustained and going, and I rationed my consumption over the course of several hours. And, well, I guess it worked, because this is the first time since then that I've just had a real, solid cup of coffee, and man oh man, oh man, can I feel it.

Crazy.

Well, it's good to know that my efforts have paid off. Now I guess I can brew a new pot of decaf, get back to work, and enjoy the remnants of this buzz. Carry on, folks.

A while ago I decided to give up caffeine. Aside from some headaches, weird dreams, and depression, the detox process was surprisingly mellow. After going the first few weeks cold turkey, I adapted pretty well. At first I just drank a lot of decaf. I still drink a bit of it, but I'm more likely to drink other things now, like water or milk or hibiscus tea or hazelnut cremosas.

This isn't to say I haven't ingested any caffeine -- there are small amounts in chocolate and things, I'll sometimes get a sip of someone else's drink, and there has been one all-nighter where I've had a double -- but it is to say that it is now firmly under control. I'm consuming it in very limited amounts, less than many people, and grossly less than I used to. I have broken the compulsive behavior pattern. That was my goal, and I feel I have accomplished it.

Removing caffeine from my life hasn't changed it as much as I thought it would, but there appear to have been improvements. My girlfriend and my baristas swear that my personality has improved, I feel a little more centered, and I think I have better attention to detail. Although I can stay awake as long as I want to, I sleep more once I go to bed. On the whole the changes have been pretty subtle. You could argue that nothing has really changed, and you might be right. Still, if nothing else I know that I'm not getting jittery or weird like I used to after drinking too much, and I just generally feel better about myself. So that's good. I like that. I intend to continue from hereon at this level. This works for me.

So now, three months later (to the day, as it turns out) I feel entitled to declare victory. Hurrah!

Well, so far, so good.

Today was pretty good. Tired, didn't have a lot of energy, but basically functional. However, that could be explained by my diet today: a bowl of ramen, a cup of decaf with a couple tablespoons of sugar, and a pack of chips. Two tacos for a midnight dinner. Surprisingly functional for so little food. Hm.

So, excepting the headaches and depression (which seem to have passed) not much seems to have changed. I'm a bit more drowsy and I'm having some issues focusing, but not really all that different from before. It's early to say, but I'm beginning to wonder if caffeine really affected my thinking all that much.

One of those mornings where I feel like I was spit out of bed.

I had a long melange of ugly dreams, including the following bits:

• Being beaten at video games, and being mercilessly mocked over it.


• Flossing my teeth, only to learn that several of them were loose and about to fall out.


• Someone I know forming an active terrorist cell, killing people and helping bring on the collapse of society (the end times?). I felt guilty because I'd known about it -- I'd been invited to join, declined, and neglected to tell anyone about it.


• Wandering through the "mysticism" section of CostCo, reading aloud the titles of my favorite subjects, while other shoppers watch me with disdain.


• Joking with friends about committing suicide. Because I was considering it.

As far as I know I'm not considering suicide, nor am I privy to any plans to form a terrorist group, but jesus, I've been really depressed over the past couple of days. It could be tied to the decaffeination process, or it could be a complete coincidence, I don't know. I'm feeling a bit better at the moment, but we'll see how things go.

I have this weird little talent in that I can't quite seem to develop addictions. I can, and often do, develop habits, and make no mistake, they're very intense habits, but they're also really easy to break. I made a conscious decision to start smoking pot, and several years later, when I decided that it had basically turned me into a loser, I decided to stop and stopped immediately. I made a conscious decision to start smoking cigarettes, and several years later, when I decided that the whole thing was just completely ridiculous, I decided to stop and stopped immediately. Same thing with drinking, although I'm more off-and-on with it. I'll start compulsively drinking for a year or two, then stop for a year or two, then start again. There are a lot of reasons for this particular behavior, and of course none of them really involve alcohol at all. In case you're wondering, I've recently stopped with the compulsive drinking.

Common to all of these vices is that I can then indulge in them when I wish without returning to the compulsive behavior patterns. I can have a smoke, or some smoke, or a drink, without it turning into anything more than that. When I have a clear sense of who I want to be, anything that does not fit that vision is treated as an anomaly and ultimately just sort of ignored.

The point is that when I say "I can stop any time I want," that's not bullshit -- I really can. But the key is wanting it. I "quit" smoking cigarettes several times, but it wasn't until I actually wanted to stop -- instead of just letting myself be influenced by a bunch of nagging hypocrites -- that it happened. And it was nearly painless and almost immediate when it did. Similarly with pot. Similarly with alcohol.

The reason I bring this all up is because I've decided to throw off my one truly deep-seated vice, which is caffeine. I started drinking caffeine compulsively back in high school. I'm not entirely sure why I did, but I'm inclined to fall back on some bullshit hypothesis about "self-medicating ADHD" or something, although I'm not sure how deeply I believe it. Over the years my love of caffeine developed into a love of coffee, adding an aesthetic/emotional aspect to the compulsion to augment the purely chemical one. I drink an enormous amount of coffee. I love coffee. I adore it. It's truly one of my favorite things. But I know the caffeine in it is crippling my mind, and that's just unconscionably stupid. I want to improve my clarity, and to develop my innate perception. That means caffeine has to go.

Caffeine is my one habit that I might rightly call an addiction. In nearly a decade and a half I've never been without it for more than a month. I think I can kick this habit, but it might actually be difficult. We'll see.

I'm drinking my first cup of decaf right now. It's a decent brand, brewed in a french press and prepared how I like it, and it's honestly delicious. Here we go...