So I’m generally averse to putting shit into my body. I eat fairly healthy and don’t drink much other than water1. It’s not like I’m on a diet or anything, it’s just that what feels good going into my stomach happens to not be the caustic shit that comes wrapped all up in plastic. So pop is definitely off my list of approved beverages, every once in a while I’ll drink it if it’s the only thing offered – but even then I’d rather scrounge a glass from somewhere and fill it up with tap water. Most meals I eat in a cafeteria with 24 different kinds of pop, and in the last year I can count how many cups of the sugary, bubbly stuff I managed to drink on one hand.
So saturday night someone gave me a few sips of their heavily-diluted super-caffeinated beverage (I believe the shit was called Rockstsar?) I couldn’t have had more then three sips, not even gulps, a very small amount. I’d played in a soccer tournament that day, 3 games each about 40 minutes long. I was exhausted2, to say the least. But the shit snapped me right up, and I got back and chilled until 5am without getting all that tired.
I didn’t think anything of it. I had figured that I’d crash as soon as I got back, not sit around for 6 hours, but chalk it up to interesting people maybe. A day or two before this eating at a local cafe, someone ordered a Dr. Pepper3 and I wanted one, but had already ordered my water. Again, I usually don’t want to have anything to do with cola, so I took note of this and decided that sometime I’d get a cup of pop from the cafeteria.
Usually when I’m about to grab anything chock full of carbonic acid my stomach turns and I go for another beverage. I don’t know if it’s a psychological or metabolic aversion, but there sure is an aversion. But yesterday at dinner that initial revulsion wasn’t there, at least in a high enough degree to turn me away. It’d been long enough since I’d used the pop dispenser though that I tried to find the little level you pull4, I had to look a second time to find the thing that says ‘Push here.’
So I get out to the cafeteria and through the course of my meal drink one cup of Dr. and two of water. The stuff isn’t that bad, but there’s no way I’d prefer it to water. It’s sort of slimy going down, and you can feel it more than you should be able to once it’s sitting down there in you. But I forgot about it after dinner, it didn’t ruin my day or anything.
Then all the sudden I’m up all night. I didn’t really get tired. For some reason I’d been trying as hard as I could to put off a french paper: beyond just diddling around the internet, I was over the top here. It was 12 before I even started working, and a diversion or two later I didn’t start writing the paper until 2 or so (I’d put down a few notes and read through some interesting sources before). So there was a bit of need to cruise through, but it was surprisingly easy. As mentioned earlier I won’t drink coffee, so it’s not like I’m popping pills to keep awake and get this paper done. I ate two bananas and a granola bar along with a few stale candy canes. I took my breaks, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world to not get this rough draft done in time, but sleep wasn’t coming to me.
Once more I didn’t take the caffeine5 into account, I had better things to think about. It’s only now that I’m wondering about this shit – can I really be so sensitive to caffeine that 12oz of soda will kick me through an all-nighter? I don’t think this is a bad thing, but I have at least one friend who drinks at least 10 times that on a daily basis. People who have a more than two cups of coffee through the day are probably getting up there as well6. That freaks me out. When their normal levels of energy are coming from however many grams of 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione, it makes you wonder how they can get up in the morning. The average young male drinks 870 cans of the shit a year7. That’s 2.3 a day, 16 a week, etc. Me never drinking any means that someone out there drinks twice that. Scary shit.
1 Juice here and there, I’ve never drank milk, coffee tastes like dirt, tea/cocoa are way more work and not that much better than water…
2 The only reason I wasn’t asleep is that we were driving back and the guy said that I have to stay awake sitting shotgun to make sure we didn’t all die…
3 (my favorite when it comes to pop)
4 The water comes out of a lemonade nozzle or something, there’s a little push lever on the side that makes it flow.
5 I got knocked out on this word in a spelling bee once, it just came back to me a week or two ago when my little brother won the Bee for his school district. Still can’t quite spell it.
Ha!
I drink so much caffeine it doesn’t even effect me anymore.
I probably have pop twice a day. Before college, and before quitting soccer, I barely ever drank it.
It feels silly to use the word “pop” too many times in one segment of writing. You had an impressive usage of synonyms.
— Saman Feb 23, 06:23 PM #
Yeah, I just think the whole thing is disgusting. But I’m definitely in the minority on this one. Someone at dinner today ate a bowl of jello, a piece of pie and two cups of carbonic acid (my new favorite synonym for the stuff), that was it… I’d die before putting that and only that into my stomach.
Cool new website btw, you’re getting good at the whole art thing.
— Kjell Feb 23, 09:05 PM #