trujoy

The other day, I realized I have a drug problem, i.e. its only a problem when I don’t get any. I’m shakey and irritable without it, fully operational in large doses, barely getting by on small…the drug I’m referring to has been around for centuries, has been used extensively, and is legal in all countries that I know about, including Australia. This drug is caffeine, and its found in its purest and most glorious form in coffee.

This addiction really came home to me the other day when it was two days before pay day, and I realized I’d run out of coffee and didn’t have enough cash to purchase said coffee. I got out of bed and growled at Bertha (my leather couch, for the uninitiated) and she really didn’t deserve such treatment for all her faithful months of service.

Then, wonders of wonders, I remembered that I always keep an emergency supply at the back of my pantry. I was digging through the cupboard when I suddenly realized I’d given the emergency supply to M the last time he stayed over. I threw back my head and howled at him and all his coffee-taking kind, and then took off for St Lucia in the blackest mood since Napolean realized that he wasn’t going to win.

The hallowed sandstone buildings did little to relieve my mood. But then I realized that the School of Social Work and Social Policy has a common room with a whole kilo tub of Nescafe 43 blend coffee (dreadful stuff for the coffee connesieur, but what can you do?) I ran to the building, up the stairs, burst into the hallway and realized that it being a Saturday, they’d shut and locked the common room to prevent theft. Stupid, stupid people.

I ran further down the hallway, and burst into a startled, unknown postgrad’s room. I started garbling about running out of coffee and it being a month until my thesis is due in, and I needed a fix, and did she have the code to open the common room? If she was worried about a dishevelled girl bursting into her room on a Saturday demanding access to a locked room, she didn’t let on, and let me into the common room without another question. Once inside, I made the strongest damn cup of coffee ever created…I swear the spoon was practically corroding in the stuff. As I sat back and took the first few sips and felt the warm liquid spread through my body and the caffeine start to kick-start my deprived body, I started to feel a little guilty. I felt like a heroine addict shooting up in the bathroom.

But you do what you can to get by, and they’ll have to pry coffee out of my cold, dead hands before I’ll give it up. It may be, as Kab says, the liquid crack of the 21st century, but I say…get me an iv bag, and just plug it into my veins!!!

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