June 6: #7 Replace your coffee with tea, or your tea with coffee
Phil: Bruce is right in that this was an easy task but it was also super eye-opening. I have become too familiar with waking up and fancying a gigantic pot of black coffee for myself and binging it until the afternoon hours. I always said I refused to become one of those people addicted to caffeine, and here I am...agonizing over switching to tea for a day. Well...I made myself a cup of green tea and sipped it while I did my morning stuff. It was actually really good and made me feel good in a way that coffee doesn’t. Like most of the challenges, the intended lesson is rather obvious and this one is to realize the authority you allow something like coffee to have over you. I've become so entangled in making sure I have my coffee and I never wanted to be that guy. Drinking that tea made me want to try new stuff so I bought some weird fruity energy drink before work too and felt like a damn watermelon by the time I was at work. In a good way. While I'll love having my coffee tomorrow, I'll also be buying myself some tea to switch it up. Variety wins the day.
Bruce: This one was an easy one but apparently not for some people, many people confessed to wanting to do it and then just decided that they can't or just out right defiantly exclaimed "no!" As one friend did. Growing up I hated the idea of coffee all the way until I was about 20 and I went upstate to school in Oswego, NY where I was perpetually broke and it was freezing cold and I needed to stay up to do work and they had free coffee which remedied all of that so I started drinking it black both to emulate my grandfather and to make it so that I wasn't really enjoying coffee because I am weirdly ascetic and stubborn in that way. Fast forward nine years and I drink coffee rather regularly sometimes in crazy amounts always strong and always black and always in large quantities. Recently I hadn't been drinking as much coffee and I probably have tea every other day at least at night to relax or settle my stomach. I liked this because it's a little more soothing even if the tea is caffeinated and it feels more hydrating to drink tea. I had three different kinds of teas today, at home I drank a yogi tea that was called cold season, I brought my Celestial Seasonings pumpkin tea and traded it for a peach tea with a friend at work… That's another thing I really like about tea, is that you can have drastically different flavors and as long as you have hot water you can make tea anywhere ( as I did at work and shared with other people.) It was communal, as well as a nice and relaxing source of warmth on this cold day. I feel like Internet culture specifically makes all of these clichés about how "I'm not a human until I drink my coffee" etc. and sort of cutely emphasizes this addiction with such exhausting predictable repetition (like the “case of the Monday's” nonsense). This was definitely a good reminder that I should scale back on the immense amount of caffeine I consume and I can hopefully avoid some ulcers in the process!
Tomorrow's challenge: #16 Have at least 3 actual phone conversations (**use your phone as a phone only?)