I'll Take Two

It had slipped my mind that Wednesdays have been declared $2.00 latte days at Espresso Royale. I had sort of adopted the notion that I should reduce my caffeine intake. It's not that it's unusually high; at its peak, it had gotten to no more than a cup of coffee or two a day. But I was not easy with the idea that the substance was slowly, but surely, becoming a sort of liquid nicotine, so I decided to try and lay off the stuff.

Goodbye, diet soda (by the way, Big K's Diet Citrus Drop is delicious, in that this-is-better-than-Mountain-Dew-but-still-has-a-little-bit-of-that-strange-diet-aftertaste kind of way). Combined with a renewed devotion to running, that was an easy decision. But the coffee -- the espresso, in particular -- has been much harder to let go. "Perhaps," I thought, "I can use a little psychological trickery on the old ticker." It is at this point that I attempted to pay homage to Pavlov, his dogs, and an educational psychology class I took in undergrad. "If I just start drinking decaf," I reasoned, "my body, confused by the smell of the coffee, will think that it's being given caffeine, when in fact it is not!" My professor would have been proud, save for the fact that I apparently, and unsurprisingly, underestimated the power of chemicals. I never took biochemistry; what do you want from me?

Here's the point: it's $2.00 latte Wednesday. I thought of continuing the caffeine break and going with the cup of decaf to go -- it's cheaper that way anyway. But for a few cents more, I could get any size latte (did I not mention that it's an any-size-you-want deal?). Suffice it to say, I am now two shots of espresso deep and feeling fantastic. There's always tomorrow for confessions and penance...