Thank You Caffeine

I am thankful for all things caffeinated — coffee, tea, soda, energy drinks, caffeine pills. I get it, we’re all stressed uni students substituting caffeine for sleep. I’m not going to lie, part of the reason why I’m thankful for caffeine is because without caffeine I wouldn’t be a functioning person. So thank you caffeine for giving me the motivation to not sleep through first period, for giving me just enough energy to do webassign, for jump starting my brain to awakeness. I’m thankful for caffeine because of the jolt of alertness caffeine sends through me. In junior year, I started my tradition of buying disgustingly sweet coffee from Einstein’s or Espresso Royale before any particularly hard exams. I didn’t drink coffee because I needed it to stay awake, instead I liked how coffee made me feel. I liked the hyperactivity. I liked how coffee made me tap my fingers quickly. I used to joke that I wasn’t funny but some unholy combination of sleep deprivation and caffeine made me funny. Sometimes when I drink coffee, I surprise myself — sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a bad way. 

I don’t know where this quote from or where I heard first say it but years ago told me that, “Sleep was like little slices of death.” And that quote resonated with me, partially because the metaphor intrigued me, and partially because I could relate to it. I’m not thankful to caffeine itself. Rather, I’m thankful to caffeine because I hated sleep. When I was a kid, I used to hate nap time. Why would I want to close my eyes and sleep when I could just spend another hour playing around. I wanted to spend every minute of every day doing something. Now a days, I’m a little more worn down but my hatred of sleep still burns with the same intensity. Why sleep when you can grind out a few more pages of an essay? Why sleep when you can study just a little more for a test. I guess I started to prioritize grades over sleep and caffeine allowed me to do that. But my hatred of sleep runs deeper than that. 

Have you ever gotten home super tired then you spend all your time doing homework? And by the time you finished all of your work, it’s already dark outside? That’s happened to me multiple times and I’m always end the day feeling super frustrated. At the end of those types of days, I’m angry because I wanted a few hours of the to be devoted solely to solely me. I wanted time to relax or binge watch shows. I felt like sleep was stealing hours of the day from me. So when I’m feeling particularly rebellious on those nights, I’ll drink another cup of coffee and stay up a few hours longer. In some ways, drinking coffee felt like an act of rebellion. I refused to let my life be consumed by work, so I’ll make more time in the day for me. I’ll stay up a few more hours to watch cat videos on youtube or read one more chapter of a novel.

But now, even if somehow science eliminated my body’s need for sleep, I think I’ll still continue to drink my daily for coffee. I’m thankful for coffee, because drinking a cup of coffee has become a calming morning ritual to me. There’s something calming about scooping out fresh coffee grounds and smelling their rich and familiar scent. I’m comforted by the familiarity of the sound of boiling water being poured through the filter. The heat on my fingers from gripping a cup of fresh hot coffee calms me. I’ve made coffee so many times, that my body goes on auto-pilot. I could make coffee in my sleep. The routines of making coffee has engraved itself onto my schedule to the point where I can’t imagine waking up on a weekday morning and not making coffee.