To pair up with the croissant post, let’s talk about that perfect cup of coffee.
As soon as it became available, I was immediately seduced by the flavorful and reproducible cup made by the incredibly wasteful Nespresso system – wasteful in that a couple of decades from now, entire landfills will be chock-full of these well marketed machines, while tons of aluminum bits slowly leaching eminently biodegradable grounds will litter what would have otherwise become rich soil imported at insufficient expense from South America or Indonesia.
So I feel a little guilty about it. Not only do I pay all my coffee money to the Nestle corporation, as the Lavazza and Segafredo machines have faded from lab memory as well as from my home, but I steadily drink much more coffee than I used to (as opposed to those brief periods surrounding marriage, thesis defense, vacations and other such deadlines).
However, yesterday took the cake. We were at (wealthy) friends’ house for lunch, and at around 3PM, they proposed coffee. As I had admired their elegant but outrageous integrated system it was only natural to try it.
I forced myself to go to bed last night, mostly because I had some gardening-induced stiffness, and thereafter awoke at 11:45PM, 12:30AM, 1:30AM, 3AM, 4AM and 6AM (before the alarm pulled me out of a superficial doze at 6:45AM). Given that “caffeine has a physiological half-life of three and a half hours (Parsons anjd Neims, 1978) to six hours (Aranda et al., 1979)”1, and the dose (500mg? 1g?) was still packing a wallop three to four half-lives later at something around 1/10th of its original strength, I wonder why I wasn’t bouncing off walls…. ah! now I understand the gardening urge!
Exactly twelve years ago, I began a year or so of a sleep schedule like that. But I’m not even nursing now. Grumble. Well, I suppose that is actually an advantage; the alternative is quite unthinkable.
Any whimsy or jollity was entirely unintentional on my part in this blog post. In case I should be mistaken in the seriousness of my intentions to be as inaccessible to the public as possible, I will put that obligatory article reference in.
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1 Bolton and Null, 1981. Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 10(3) 202-211.
Whimsy on, Heather.
I can’t touch coffee or tea after about five o’clock or I am wide-eyed all night. But I like making coffee by hand (grinding it, then steeping it) because it’s a bit of a pain and it regulates my intake — over which otherwise I have no self control. A machine like that would be the death of me.
I measured a WJQ (Whimsy and Jollity Quotient) of 0.988, so you’re OK. It’s when you get over unity that you need to worry.
I’ll invite Saint Nicholas for the next guest post, then, just to keep some balance.
And a policeman or two. And a costermonger. And maybe a lighthouse keeper.