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jayfurrSo there I was, slouched in a heap in an examining room at my doctor's office, waiting for a fasting cholesterol check. I'd had nothing to eat or drink except for water since dinner the night before and here it was, just past 11 in the morning. My thoughts wandered. I found myself pondering, "What would be the hardest possible Lenten vow I could realistically make?"
Since "death warmed over" just about summed up how I felt at that exact moment, the answer came pretty quickly: "NO COFFEE".
I'm not a guy who's got a coffee monkey on his back in the traditional sense. I can have a single cup on a Saturday or Sunday morning and last the rest of the day without any difficulties.
Really.
Okay, I DO sip cold black coffee all day from a 1-quart Nalgene bottle when I'm training, but appalling as that sounds, some days I don't even make it to the bottom of the bottle. I bring it with me to work just in case it turns into one of those days, but most days it doesn't.
What I'm trying to say is that I do drink coffee but I don't need six pots a day to just make it to the barely-human level.
But I DO need that first cup of the day. It's so essential to my metabolic processes that when I'm on the road, staying in hotels, I usually use my in-room coffee maker before going to bed each evening to make a mini-pot's worth of coffee to swill down the next morning. The mini-pot sits there all night cooling and by dawn has reached that perfect level of semi-evaporated room-temperature brackishness which does to my groggy brain approximately the same thing that a can of spinach does for Popeye's muscles. (Insert "KA-WHOOMBA" and onomatopoeic words to that effect.)
This morning I felt like a piece of warmed-over lunchmeat, hanging out on a clothesline, twisting slowly in a hazy cloud of ... I dunno, stupor.
I honestly can't imagine what it would be like if I got all bold and mighty and said "I WILL DRINK NO COFFEE THROUGHOUT LENT". Or even worse, if I said I wouldn't drink any caffeinated soda or anything else with the magic dust in it. If I basically went all Mormon and stuff vis-a-vis caffeine.
Walking sixty miles for the 3-Day would be NOTHIN' compared to that. I honestly wonder if I'd be able to do it.
So unless someone out there is reading this and thinking "heh heh heh, I'll make him a deal, I'll donate $100 to his 3-Day total and I'll go get all my friends to donate too, but in return for our $500 he has to abstain from caffeine throughout Lent", I'm going to have to think of some other meaningful Lenten vow.
(But just in case anyone DOES get the urge to make me that bet, I'm all ears. It'll be hell on Earth, but I'll do just about anything to find a cure for breast cancer. My donation URL is http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurr and if I get $500 in donations between now and Ash Wednesday service tomorrow night, I'll give it the old college try.)
Since "death warmed over" just about summed up how I felt at that exact moment, the answer came pretty quickly: "NO COFFEE".
I'm not a guy who's got a coffee monkey on his back in the traditional sense. I can have a single cup on a Saturday or Sunday morning and last the rest of the day without any difficulties.
Really.
Okay, I DO sip cold black coffee all day from a 1-quart Nalgene bottle when I'm training, but appalling as that sounds, some days I don't even make it to the bottom of the bottle. I bring it with me to work just in case it turns into one of those days, but most days it doesn't.
What I'm trying to say is that I do drink coffee but I don't need six pots a day to just make it to the barely-human level.
But I DO need that first cup of the day. It's so essential to my metabolic processes that when I'm on the road, staying in hotels, I usually use my in-room coffee maker before going to bed each evening to make a mini-pot's worth of coffee to swill down the next morning. The mini-pot sits there all night cooling and by dawn has reached that perfect level of semi-evaporated room-temperature brackishness which does to my groggy brain approximately the same thing that a can of spinach does for Popeye's muscles. (Insert "KA-WHOOMBA" and onomatopoeic words to that effect.)
This morning I felt like a piece of warmed-over lunchmeat, hanging out on a clothesline, twisting slowly in a hazy cloud of ... I dunno, stupor.
I honestly can't imagine what it would be like if I got all bold and mighty and said "I WILL DRINK NO COFFEE THROUGHOUT LENT". Or even worse, if I said I wouldn't drink any caffeinated soda or anything else with the magic dust in it. If I basically went all Mormon and stuff vis-a-vis caffeine.
Walking sixty miles for the 3-Day would be NOTHIN' compared to that. I honestly wonder if I'd be able to do it.
So unless someone out there is reading this and thinking "heh heh heh, I'll make him a deal, I'll donate $100 to his 3-Day total and I'll go get all my friends to donate too, but in return for our $500 he has to abstain from caffeine throughout Lent", I'm going to have to think of some other meaningful Lenten vow.
(But just in case anyone DOES get the urge to make me that bet, I'm all ears. It'll be hell on Earth, but I'll do just about anything to find a cure for breast cancer. My donation URL is http://www.the3day.org/goto/jayfurr and if I get $500 in donations between now and Ash Wednesday service tomorrow night, I'll give it the old college try.)
