dsandler.org

I hereby announce that I am nearly two weeks into Decaf 2008, the latest in a series of attempts to reduce or eliminate my caffeine intake.

It had become clear to me that I have grown to depend on coffee’s (sometimes uncontrollable) capacity to power my brain. Ever since I started drinking coffee (my freshman year at Rice), it has been a perennial companion. We even threw a couple of parties—under the moniker “Devil Mug Caféâ€â€”in honor of its awesome and terrible power:

Coffee giveth, but coffee taketh away. It has exacerbated my predisposition to anxiety and panic. It makes Erin not want to kiss me. And when I try to give it up, it fights back. I’m unsettled by the degree to which I appear not to function without it.

For more than ten years, coffee has been by turns my friend (making me the best version of myself) and my enemy (making me the worst version of myself). Its companionship is mercurial and destructive. Erin has therefore dubbed coffee my bad friend. (I tend think of it more as a seductress, but I can see how she might not share that characterization.)

On a related note, I am now officially looking for other, less-harmful habits to pick up. Ideally: something that will give me the feeling of inner warmth and cerebral industriousness without the unpleasant side-effects of 200 mg of caffeine. Tea is perhaps an option, but it must be reasonably decaffeinated (as anyone who was present at Pei Wei two weeks ago will attest—stupid iced green tea!).

My (non-bad) friend Jeremy has proposed “weekend coffee†as a way to enjoy its effects on occasion without developing a mind-bending tolerance for them, but I fear I would find my bad friend on the couch long after the weekend is over. Recidivism is a potent risk with such a strategy.

However, as the father of a three-month-old, Jeremy also offered a word of warning: once our baby arrives, I may need my bad friend more than ever. Coffee, it is said, is the third parent.

Diedrich Coffee, the OC-based retailer and wholesaler (known in Houston for its beautiful—now defunct—Westheimer location, which was actually owned by a local Houston franchisee since all Diedrich company-owned stores were sold to Starbucks a couple of months ago), has been selected to provide coffee for the new Fondren Library Pavilion. The Thresher editors are cautiously optimistic and hope the new caffeine stand differentiates itself from the ever-improving Coffeehouse with longer hours (possible) or food (unlikely).

In other news, Shipley’s coffee is still terrible—even worse than the (not dead, just) badly-burned coffee they make here in the departmental kitchen. Bleah.

Someone’s taken it upon himself to photograph the double-Starbucks in River Oaks, on West Gray at Shepherd. (Non-Houstonites: the original location is mirrored across Gray by a drive-thru location.)

[Seen on delicious links tagged “houston”]

Wooden tables seating six replace the round four-seaters at the Coffeehouse.

They’ve begun making improvements to the Student Center, including the Coffeehouse (see previous dsandler.org coverage: 1 2). So far, only furniture has been added (as seen above, and elsewhere in the building).

I never heard anything back from the Rice Coffeehouse about my suggestions for the renovation, but a recent visit to the site shows that they’ve developed a final concept that seems to share a few things with my sketch (including bar seating and a convenient coffee-condiment station).

I’m still not sure I like the partitions, but maybe they’ll look better in person than they do in my head.

For those of you who, like me, are occasionally frustrated, confused, and ashamed at Starbucks, linguist and barista Meghan Sensenbach offers a survivor’s guide: Starbucks Drinks Simplified and Ask the Barista. Example from ATB: