Caffeine au lait

Café au lait feels like Paris even in Seguin. My final gift to myself before reorienting my mind toward the final days of the semester: the pungent aroma, the sound of steaming milk, the darkest liquid, the Russian porcelain cup, a spoonful of demerara sugar, starbursts of white blending into my favorite warm tan, and finally, my tongue.

Then there’s the newspaper with the article about caffeine abuse.

Emergency physicians, it turns out, don’t ask us if we’ve ingested caffeine before running stress tests or admitting young people complaining of heart palpitations or chest pains into the hospital. Recent research found, however, that young people were abusing caffeine in about two thirds of the cases researchers at Northwestern University investigated.

These researchers, who presented their results at a convention of emergency physicians in October, were talking about caffeine supplements. Pills. They weren’t asking about the caffeine we drink as food but about the caffeine we take as an over-the-counter stimulant. A drug.

The Cox News Service, however, made the connection and presented the caffeine content of some of our favorite beverages.

My café au lait had between 104 and 192 milligrams of caffeine, according to Cox. If I had bought it at Starbucks instead, it would probably have contained 200 milligrams. Even if I drank more Coca-Cola, I would have consumed only 34 milligrams. Iced tea might have contributed as few as nine milligrams. Even Red Bull or Rockstar energy drinks would have had fewer milligrams of caffeine (only 80).

One No Doz tablet contains 200 milligrams.

The doctors who commented on the research presentation at the American College of Emergency Physicians said that caffeine abuse is rarely recognized because we consider the stimulant safe because it is a food, not a drug.

Dr. Danielle McCarthy, one of the study’s authors said:

"We want people ingesting caffeine pills and supplements to know that caffeine is a drug, and overuse is potentially harmful, especially when mixed with other pharmaceuticals for euphoria. There is a trend in the pro-drug culture towards promoting legal alternatives to illegal drugs, and it can be very harmful."

The article reminded me of some of the few times I have feared for my safety in public or on the road. I had just arrived at a coffee shop in Chapel Hill, N.C., which has a thriving coffee culture, and parked my 11-year-old Geo Metro (aqua with a pink racing stripe) next to a black SUV.

When I opened the car door, it touched the running board on the SUV. The vehicle’s owner leaped out of the driver’s seat, cell phone still in hand, and stalked toward me, shouting. I have seen eyes like his before when people had too much coke or when they were about to beat someone to a pulp. Submission seemed the best strategy for avoiding violence. I called him “sir,” apologized for touching his car and listened quietly while he heaped verbal abuse on me and my car. (If I’d had a better one, I would have cared.)

His paint job intact (not even a chip of aqua on the black), his words and mine carried over the airwaves to whomever he was talking to, I apologized again and dared to walk toward the coffee shop.

He must have had quite a few milligrams of caffeine to have felt the touch of my happy little car’s door as a threat.

Several times in Austin, home to 40 Starbucks and numerous other chain and local coffee purveyors, drivers have directed their rage against me on the city streets. Red faces and yelling, even on an early Sunday morning a block or so off Congress Avenue (near a Starbucks location, incidentally) when I waited for the birds to fly out of the lane instead of moving forward immediately. That one included leaning out the driver’s side window shouting and shaking a fist.

Seguin hasn’t developed a coffee culture. Usually, I think that’s a problem because I want to sit among other coffee-drinking book readers. Maybe I need to rethink that. We have one friendly coffee place/ chiropractor’s office (I like the combination of stimulation and relaxation), ChiroJava. We can get adjusted after a caffeine binge, or keep our drinking in our homes and off the streets.

Gym Source

Resist mindless buying: Reverse shop instead

A couple of weeks ago I e-mailed my friend Sue to tell her about my achievements and challenges of the fall semester. Really, I wanted to hear a reassuring voice tell me that my feelings of ill health and inability to keep up don’t mean I am not ok.

Part of getting back to equilibrium was in the very listing of all the things I’m doing and am supposed to be doing, want to be doing, am putting off doing, wouldn’t be doing at all if someone else didn’t tell me I had to, think I should be doing.

Instead of writing back to tell me how impressed she was about all I am able to accomplish in spite of not feeling well, she seemed even more concerned about how much I do than she was about the health issue I had told her about. She wrote back suggestions about what to look for in a doctor (she’s had her own bout with serious illness recently) and added the following:

I wish I knew some magic for what ails you (and all of us). It's some kind of weird late-modern high-urban hyper-productive neurosis, where life lacks significant seasonal variation and down-time, and we have somehow internalized all kinds of nonsense about what the hell we are doing here.

I think that's what Foucault was talking about, but since I gave up super-productivity before he came along, I haven't read enough to be sure.

All I have learned about how to live in the 1.5 million years I have been on this earth is that what makes a good thing good is the empty space around it.

Here's to empty space (I talk a much better game than I play).

I have thought of these few short paragraphs (with lots of white space around them) every day since I received them.

For those who haven’t read much of Michel Foucault’s work, here ‘s the gist of what Sue calls to mind by invoking this French philosopher to comment on my predicament. Foucault focused his writing largely on the workings of power in human society. One of his books that I read closely traces the evolution of punishment from medieval and early modern Europe when punishment was heavy handed and publicly theatrical through the development of the modern idea that places punishment in the hands of specialists who conduct punishment (sometimes known as rehabilitation or therapy) inside the walls of institutions. On the outside of the walls, citizens of modern societies have learned to police their own behavior. In doing this, we have taken for ourselves the function public and awful punishment served in society in earlier times. The locus of social control is within each of us, implanted by social processes that involve broader and deeper observation of our lives on the part of social institutions.

For me, this means that I don’t have to be made to work because I believe that I am not ok unless I am constantly engaged in productive activity. I have internalized the idea that my life is not worthwhile unless I serve the machine of society.

Before I ever read Foucault, actually before he had written some of his most influential work, when I was living in Tallahassee, Fla., I was conscious that I felt ok only when I went to Governor’s Square Mall, bought things and ate at the Chinese fast-food Chinese place there. Call me precocious. Prescient, even.

I had internalized the need to act as a cog in the capitalist economy that was rarely satisfied during my student years. But I took the deep relief I felt when I went to the mall as a red flag. I read critiques of capitalism and developed a fair amount of independence in the face of its voracious appetite. Now, malls provoke in me discomfort at the excesses of 21st-century consumption rather than inner peace.
While many of my fellow Americans have embarked on the mindless shopping that has become Christmas, I am at home creating empty space around my productivity, and in my closet.

Reverse shopping.

I have packed up six shopping bags to take to the local thrift store. I even tried to deliver them this afternoon, but the thrift shop is closed today. Reverse shopping seems like evidence that I did a pretty good job expunging the internalized need to participate unthinkingly in the mechanisms of economic power that control us.

As part of the closet cleaning, I also un-piled my bedroom chair. Three months of clothes and papers had gathered there in the corner of my bedroom while I pushed and pulled myself from class to interviews to conferences to election work to meetings to...

I sat in the chair all morning, grading papers, surrounded by relatively uncluttered space. Here’s hoping I’ll be able to reorient my relationship to productivity as well, before my own drive for super productivity knocks me off.

Gym Source

The Democratic Process

In the last few months I have learned that I am better at working on elections than at writing about them. I’m not so good at campaigning, either, but I am actively facilitating the democratic process.

(I also applied for tenure and wrote several articles for the San Antonio Express News in the weeks Womanhollerin was more-or-less silent. You can find the article citations in SAEN's online archive, but the actual articles come at a price. Sorry.)

Voters elected Democratic candidates all over the country. Even in Texas the Democrats made a good showing. Chris Bell came close to winning the governor's race, and I don't see how Gov. Rick Perry can avoid considering a variety of viewpoints when not even half of Texan voters touched his spot on the screen. I like to think that wise counsel will filter up to the president now that he has to deal with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. It's just not good for anyone to stew in his own juices for as long as President Bush has.

My 13 ½ hours at the public library in Seguin working as an election clerk for the general election Nov. 7 kept me busier than the hours I spent at the primaries in the spring. The day was long but rewarding. We figured out that the turnout was about 40 percent for the precincts we served, including early voters but not absentees. People, including me, get really excited about this great turnout. As soon as the initial excitement about large numbers of voters washes from the tip of my toes to the top of my head, I remember that this is still fewer than half of those who were eligible in the precincts. How many people didn’t even bother to register???

I think that we need to make voting fun – maybe hold block parties on Election Day. We could set some picnic tables up under the trees in front of the library, and grill some hot dogs. At our polling place, we have a lot of fun while we work, maybe our enthusiasm for the democratic process would catch in other people if they hung out with us for a little while.

One of the Democratic Club members here in Guadalupe County thinks that voters should get an income tax credit for exercising their right to the ballot. His idea may resonate with more voters than mine does.

I think it might help if the balloting didn’t take place on Tuesday. I’m lucky that I have a flexible job that allows me to shuffle my on-campus responsibilities to put in my hours at the polls. How many people who have not retired can do this? If we voted on the weekend, we could give the election more of a party atmosphere. My French friends tell me that everyone in the village congregates for the voting and they socialize after the polls are closed. I think that would make voting fun and strengthen our community ties.

I like working in my own precinct because I get to see my neighbors. Luckily, this time we didn’t have much time to chat because we had a steady line of voters all day. I did overhear several conversations between people who had been meaning to contact each other and putting it off. They caught up with each other after they voted. Two women who live in the same block actually met for the first time because they signed in to vote one after another and one of the pollworkers commented on the nearness of their addresses.

I’m about to embark on a project to get even more conversation going among residents of our community who might not speak to each other often (if at all). The Guadalupe County Community Symposium took an interest in an idea I’ve held in the back of my mind since I moved here in 2002: a community conversation about who we all are. We’re going to use a model created by the Study Circles Foundation that I studied in a public conflict resolution course at UNC and tried with my neighborhood association in Durham, N.C., a few months before I moved away.

More to come about the Study Circle idea and reinvigorating American democracy and community. Regenerating excitement in democratic processes is the best way I know to honor the veterans who have fallen to defend them.

Gym Source