"diet coke is my baby" or "dude, what did that dead horse ever do to you?"

so i have often enough expounded various theories, thoughts, and feelings regarding my caffeine use in the last few years. i've been known to swing from bible-belt condemnation to heroin junkie appreciation in the space of, say, a day or so. even this waffling has been attributed to both caffeine overuse and caffeine withdrawal (though on separate days). so after about four years of basically emphatically embracing every single degree of "yay" or "nay" possible at different times, i decided to do the unthinkable: sit down and do research, and then follow it up with a few field tests and come to a conclusion that the scientific method could be proud of.

we're not too post-modern for the scientific method yet are we? i hope not. it'd be great if somehow postmodernity led us into a new theological conservatism.

i don't know what the hell that means.

so my original theory was that caffiene was evil. i got infected with this idea that it was bad for you health-wise and that it turned normal people into annoying-as-fuck Type A assholes, effectively converting them into machines to do america's "work-till-you-drop" bidding. i still sort of think this, but we'll get there.

eventually, i came to embrace the diet coke because it seems to help the sort of rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness writing style i use when working on albums, articles, etc. it made me more inhibitionless. the energy of the idea and the excitement overpowered rational thinking. i had enough energy built up inside that jumping off the ledge was just a way of wringing it all out. and that wasn't bad.

when i got to pullman and started the MA program, i reverted to opinion 1. mostly because it was a really challenging environment, emotionally, socially, academically, professionally, and i didn't want to wade through it in jump-off-the-cliff mode. it was a self-defense mechanism to make sure that i remained self-aware enough to get enough sleep, to interact meaningfully with people, to be fully aware of my surroundings, to wield a sword instead of a nuclear bomb. or a lightsaber instead of a blaster if you prefer.

eventually this lofty dream dissapated, due partly to circumstance and due partly to the collapse of my own discipline. it was easier to spend 18 hours a day working (4-5 of those socializing/slacking off) than it was to spend 12 hours a day working diligently and then have time for sleep and relaxation. everybody around me seemed already enmeshed in this full-steam-ahead-consequences-be-damned environment, and so it was really easy to say "fuck it, i'm on a rollercoaster!" and spend days at a time listening to my adrenals screaming.

while this was all going on, i was wavering between personal opinions. sometimes it was "teh caffiene turnz you into a zombeh!" and sometimes it was "america makes it so you can't live without this stuff and i want to have sex with diet coke!" sometimes it was in-between.

so last week, i FINALLY spent a LOT of time researching caffeine: its chemical effects, its makeup, its health effects, etc. i was trying to separate company propaganda from hippie-dippy rationalizing, from actual scholarship. and what i found, pretty much universally, is that caffeine is not at all a health risk unless you're using too much of it. unless you're using enough to initiate serious withdrawal symptoms, there's pretty much no way to hurt yourself. your body just adjusts. now there's a part of me that insists that it's sort of illogical that overloading your adrenal system daily for 50 years is probably not good for you, but so far studies haven't confirmed that. so i'm stuck between what seems to be common sense and results of scientific studies. one thing the studies are generally in agreement on is that "too much" caffeine (resulting in "bad" effects) is a different level for pretty much everyone. same as alcohol, THC, and other things that i actually haven't abused in the past.

so i figured i'd experiment on myself. that's not as cool as it sounds. basically, what i did all this week, when i was working 10-12 hours a day and sleeping about 2-3 (on average) due to my anxiety issues, i completely avoided any caffeine and tried to see if it effected me at all (i.e. if i just fucking died to death).

and it didn't. i felt essentially the same as i do with it. i was a little less happy-go-lucky all day and a little less scatterbrained (bad and good respectively), but since those are apparently the main effects of inhaling a healthy amount of caffeine, i sort of expected that.

but i didn't die of sleep deprivation. i didn't become all mushy Type B hippie goodness. caffeine essentially makes little to no difference. so here's my decision. it might come as a surprise, but it's an agree/disagree sort of thing. compromise? me? nah...

i think it's like any other drug. if you overuse it, you're going to a) become a huge asshole and b) probably hurt yourself. i've been one of those people who "need" it to get started in the morning, and i don't see how that's good for you. on the other hand, it does give you a little boost, and it's nice in that way in the same way that smoking is nice. or how it's fun to drink sometimes because it loosens you up. i guess my point is, i sort of realized that it really ISN'T bad by itself. and can sometimes even be good. i think the problem (and way back when, the beginning of my concern before i got sidetracked) is that our society in particular (or culture, whatever you want to call it) really still adheres to that industrial-revolution-era mentality of "work-till-you-drop". if you don't fall into bed exhausted at night from doing something you hate, then you're not american, dammit! and caffeine helps perfectly with this. it'll convince you you're happy when you're not, it'll convince you you're rested when you're exhausted, and it'll allow you to perform distasteful social functions that normally you'd be smart enough to avoid.

this semester, i've cut back my use a bit to only a certain amount a day, and i find that it really helps. it's nice to have when i have it, and then by the time i'm ready to transition out of "crazy-afternoon-work" mode it's worn off and i can be a different sort of person when i'm just ready to hang out or relax. so it's good.

i now am willing to accept the fact that using caffeine won't kill you or destroy your body's ability to (insert whatever vital function you like here). however, i still see it lumped into the same usage category as sleeping pills abused by people who wouldn't need them if they could more constructively deal with their issues, as tylenol downed by the bottle by people who don't think it's important to address the fact that they might be sick or to find out why, and as alcohol or recreational drugs used by people not just occasionally for fun, but often because those people are hiding from something. that i think it a problem. and i've done all those things before so i'm not trying to preach from a silver pulpit. i'm just saying that the thing itself isn't bad (as i might have previously believed) but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be more awareness across the board concerning the capacity for which it can be abused (and teaching college i'm in a unique position to provide evidence of said abuse by about all 80 of my students each semester). i'm still concerned about my own ability to use it to avoid problems (and not doing that), and i'm still concerned about a lot of the people i know that do this on a regular basis. but it's good to know (or at least think i know) that the substance itself isn't necessarily to blame. so now i can slam a diet coke tomorrow and then instantly become cooler and more attractive! FUCK YEAH! AMERICA!!!