“I need some caffeine,” my brother yawned as he climbed off the freshly purchased air mattress on my apartment floor. He opened my fridge door. He closed my fridge door. He stared at me in horror. “You don’t have sodas?”

“Um, no. Welcome to the crazy house,” I replied. This was coming from the woman who drank five canned diet sodas a day back in February and loved the sweet, fizzy poison. “I don’t think I have any caffeine in the house, except for some old tea bags. Technically the decaffeinated coffee has some caffeine, but you’ll have to drink a lot of it to get a buzz.”

“I can’t believe this,” he said. My poor brother had spent the previous day moving and needed the insane jolt of consciousness to the brain provided by caffeine if he was going to pack up the rest of his kitchen and closets today.

“Sorry,” I said. “I got rid of all the caffeine because of my headache.”

I don’t know whether essentially eliminating caffeine from my diet has helped decrease the [...]

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If I ever look back and wonder exactly when I became a coffee addict, let it be known that it wasn’t when I worked at place that had a Starbucks on campus, nor was it when I worked at a place where they made a fresh pot every morning. No, it was the day I discovered that coffee has essentially no calories. It was yesterday. I wasn’t born then, but I sure do feel like it.

I’ve been feeling a bit sleepy during the day lately. I’m not really sure why. I’ve been getting enough sleep and I’ve been eating normally. The paranoid part of my brain suspects that this is the first sign of a horrible, painful, terminal illness and months from now I will look back and wonder why I ignored the subtle warning signs and didn’t get treatment early. In reality, I’ve probably just been working too hard. Sleepy as I may be, I don’t normally drink coffee. It took me two months to spend the $10 Starbucks card I got for Christmas. [...]

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I’ve decided to change doctors. Bye-bye Dr. Pepper and hello Dr. K. Yes, I am switching to generic brand soda.

It’s odd that I’ve been so loyal to name brands in the soda aisle when in every other part of the grocery store I buy the store brand without question. It’s cheaper and it’s usually made by the same manufacturer. Sometimes they just package the same product in different boxes, though sometimes they use different recipes and the taste may vary slightly. You’re just not paying for their advertising budget. My only exceptions so far have been fudge pops and whipped cream. The store brand fudge pops tasted like they had a coating of chocolate fur, perhaps shaved from one of those chocolate Easter bunnies. The store brand whipped cream melted in my fridge, making it significantly less creamy or whipped.

For some reason I always had a negative connotation with store brand soda. I think I had some as a kid, spit it out, and forever thought it was nasty. However, my brother said he’d started [...]

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