hey! where’s my coffee!?

Bad habits:

I drank too much coffee yesterday and today I pay the price with a stiff back.

Hypertension being the price we are willing to pay for our caffeine addiction

-an addiction we recently formed to compensate for the fact that we aren’t getting enough sleep.

(Statistically speaking, we are now averaging about 7.1 hrs of sleep a day, when 30 years ago we were getting just over 9.)

In 1950, the quality of coffee was so bad that average consumption of coffee was in steady decline. It continued in decline through the 1980’s.

But then wages stagnated, we compensated by becoming broke hipster, and everyone was working longer and longer hours. Coffee marketers took notice.

Caffeine consumption has since skyrocketed. Now it’s in soda pop and cereals. I heard the other day that Tim Horten’s has already sold 150 million coffees this year. It’s only March.

Sometimes I crush espresso beans in put them in my brownies.

Cafes are to people, what bars were to my dad’s generation.

In 1900, the average consumer used less than 3 pounds of sugar a year. Now it’s over 100.

Like I said, we compensate for our over-programmed under-stimulating lives with our addictions.

Caffeine helps me think that dull people are marginally interesting.

Coffee helps me get up at 6 – drive 1.5hrs to work – sit through whatever work bullshit I’ll have to sit through today – it helps me get back into my car and sit another 1.5hrs, only to make dinner while my partner takes the kids to god-knows-what program they are in tonight. Violin. Kuman. Martial Arts. When do swim lessons start? It’s definitely something, though. Every night it’s something.

And caffeine will be there, tomorrow, to help me do it all – all over again.

Good habits:

I love going for a walk with the dog through the morning forest, with a hot coffee. I bought a $5 travel mug at the local 5-and-dime just for this purpose; it was the best $5 I’ve spent since I came back home. Early morning in the forest with a coffee. What’s not to like?

Today, we had all the chores and errands done by 2, it is incredibly warm for this time of year, and so my mom and I sat on the porch for a while and shared a 1/2 pot of coffee and read books.

She drinks her diner coffee straight. Black. Old school.

There is only one kind of coffee in her books. Diner Coffee.

Me? I’ve always been a cream and sugar kind of guy. French presses. Americanos. Lattés. Cappuccinos. Diner.

A coffee for every mood. A mood for every coffee.

Good coffee after great sex can make you cry.

The best art houses of Europe were all coffee houses first.

9 out of every 10 Pulitzer Prize winners drink coffee.

The hippest neighborhoods always have the hippest cafés.

Drink a coffee in my cafe,

eat one of our homemade treats (made fresh this morning in my mother’s bakery),

and for 15 minutes, you will feel immortal…

 

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/the-culture-of-coffee-drinkers/