coffee – Clara Hsu

Cold Turkey

Hard to imagine dropping a habit, especially something that have been doing for years. I tried but usually failed. Diet change is easier said than done. A simple cup of coffee is not so simple to disregard. It takes more than courage. It takes a will of steel.

My father-in-law stopped smoking cigarettes (in his seventies) when my son was born. He didn’t want to hold the baby against his smokey shirt. It was love that made him stop.

Ultimately it comes down to what one wants and not what is important. How much does the shadow of consequence play in a decision? Is this another battle between good and evil?

People usually say, “You stopped cold turkey? Congratulations!” Maybe whatever it is, it’s a good thing.

Photo: (c) iStockphoto.com/ Debbi Smirnoff

Chemically Challenged

If someone said to me when I was young: “Nosebleed is caused by a chemical imbalance in your body .” I might have appreciated chemistry as a subject more. Instead, studying symbols and formulas bored me. Now that I’m at an age when the body starts breaking down, I realize it is all chemistry and I have to become my own chemist in order to keep myself healthy.

A cup of coffee a day seems a mild indulgence. But that cup of coffee proved detrimental when I started experiencing palpitations. Why did it turn on me at midlife? I stopped drinking coffee entirely but whenever I smelled the rich aroma my nose would twitch like a mouse’s.

Maybe it is stress, and stress causes the body to react chemically. Vacationing in Turkey recently, I had the espresso-like Turkish coffee and their “American” Nescafe almost every day. Palpitation was a thought in my mind but it never happened. What does it say about this body of fluid? Maybe it was the combination with the nargile (water pipe) that balanced my yin and yang!

A Mop for the Spill

It took only a cup of coffee latte to decommission a bus. An old lady spilled it. There was nothing to mop it. The driver called command central, a spill…a spill…and herded the rest of us off the bus like a flock of sheep.

Sometimes I wonder why a bus doesn’t come and when it does, is so crowded. Now I know things like the spill and other mishaps may be the cause. Putting aside the blame, which in this case was clearly the passenger’s, I wonder why buses aren’t equipped with a little housekeeping compartment. A towel would have taken care of the matter. A dustpan for debris? And insist the guilty ones clean up after themselves. Yes it may still throw the timing off, but offenders won’t get to walk away from their mess like spoiled children.