There was a point in my life where I was not allowed to drink coffee. As in, friends would literally take a cup of coffee away from me. I suppose this had to do with the fact that if I had a single cup of coffee, I would be hyperactive for hours upon hours on end. I would talk five times faster than I already do, and basically wouldn’t slow down for at least 6 hours. Yep, it was pretty bad…but then, grad school hit. In order to get through the mountainous pile of homework and projects, that single cup of coffee became a staple. It would still keep me wired for hours, but at the time, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. I didn’t really like the taste of coffee, so much in fact that I would drench it in sugar and cream, even if it were flavored coffee. That eventually changed as well. By the time I graduated, it was a routine for me to walk down to the coffee shop at 10:30 at night, where the owner would already have a cup of coffee sitting there waiting for me to pick it up. I would thank him, then walk back up to my apartment where I worked for another hour or two, and then pass out. No more of the coffee keeping me up for hours upon hours, now I could just drink a cup, then go right home and pass out if I wanted to. I think, at that point in my life, I was definitely a coffee addict.

I’ve definitely cut back quite a bit since then, but I think that mentality of “hey, why not, I’ll just drink a cup of coffee” is still with me. My lifestyle has changed quite a bit since then in that I don’t stay up till 2 in the morning getting work done. I do, however, get up earlier, so I guess that offsets the staying up late. Maybe the reason I drink coffee nowadays is not because I need it to keep me up, or even wake me up, but that now it’s that I know what’s good coffee, and I like that, so I’ll drink it…so, I guess the question really is, does that make me a coffee addict, or a coffee lover?