Pushing Thirty

     It’s been the sort of six days that can spin your head around.  It’s been one of those weeks where everything seems to change, suddenly, and suddenly for the better.  It went kind of like….. Interview for new job on Tuesday.  Get a call offering the position on Wednesday.  Train Thursday.  Train Friday and get my new computer software installed.  Work 7am to 530pm Saturday and then 7am to 130pm Sunday and I get to start again at 7am tomorrow too.  Kind of a no-time to full-time in a heartbeat kinda thing.

      And I can’t complain.  I’ll have to keep you all posted on my new job being a secretary/dispatcher for a locksmith company, because really, if they could have made a job for me, this would be it.  I get the sort of intellectual entertainment from it as I do when I play a really good simulation game.  I’m working from home now, which in the winters in Boston is going to be it’s own reason to be excited about this position.  But somewhere along the way as I was cleaning my apartment and trying to get set up to have a home office something changed.

     To say that coffee runs in my blood would be an understatement.  I was that girl that worked at a coffee shop for a long time.  I’m very rarely without a cup of coffee any time day or night.  It doesn’t keep me up, I’ve been known to brew a pot an hour before bed and be just fine with sleeping caffeinated.  But last night, when at nine at night I went for a walk to get a cup of iced coffee I thought to myself about halfway there, “If I have to get up at six, I should really get decaf.”

     Now, I know this seems like common sense to pretty much the whole world.  But if I have ever had an addiction, a true addiction, it’s caffeine.  It’s not just the headaches from withdrawal, it’s not just the fact that I can’t get over the way it feels on the roof of my mouth or the way it coats my throat, warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  It is a ritual for me, a little thing I do for myself that makes me feel content and calm and good on the most basic of levels.  But at a pure chemical level, it’s the caffeine within the taste that is what I love.

     So within the next five minutes I decided that something would be wrong with me if I gave in to the sudden urge to be rational and that I Must get a regular coffee no matter what, simply to stay true to myself.  I opened the door, I stood in the short line of one person in front of me, and I had it on the tip of my tongue.  I was rehearsing it in my head “Medium iced french vanilla with cream and sugar please.”  And I was feeling good.  I was doing a little happy dance with my feet as I shuffled in place, the coffee, the real true thing, would be mine.  I decided I was still that insane girl who didn’t care how I was going to make it work, as long as I did make it work.  I told myself to hell with exhaustion, if I was tired tomorrow, I was just going to have to be tired tomorrow.  And then it happened.

      “Could I please get a small iced decaf, cream and sugar?”  And he repeated the order as if giving me a second chance to grab that part of myself I felt slipping away and say “No.  Not that at all.  That’s not me, that’s… too responsible, too concerned with making it work well instead of just making it work somehow, I don’t know what I was thinking, large iced french vanilla cream and sugar please.”  But I didn’t.  I said “Yup, thank you.”

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