Coffee Hangover

I come to the office on most days with a coffee hangover. This usually happens the morning after a day in which I have more than eight shots of espresso and take a can of coffee in the evening, which happens to be most days. The thing I notice most--more than the loss of motivation to do anything work related or the inability to focus on anything for more than three seconds or the synesthetic weight-gain, which is to say, lethargy--is that it requires a monumental effort to produce words, sentences: to verbally communicate to other people.  That I experience this symptom so acutely, I have affectionately dubbed the sensation of my almost daily coffee hangover The Hush. 

One day, maybe six months ago, when I was teaching English at Mae Fah Luang University, I walked to my office, thoroughly Hush-stricken, and saw a colleague of mine approaching from the other end of the hall. We had about fifty meters before we would cross the threshold after which a verbal acknowledgment of the other's existence--by way of salutation w/r/t time of day and/or perfunctory question, usually about whether the other had eaten or where the other was coming from/going to--would be incumbent upon both of us.  I suddenly regretted waking up that morning, wishing that for just one day, I would not have to utter a single disingenuous sound. 

I chewed on the words silently, preparing for the moment when I'd have to spit them out. I realized that after I spoke to him, my colleague and tormentor, I would be expected to produce many more words, phony and fluffy words, to hundreds of students, all day long. Our eyes looked around the hall (the window, our own feet) until we entered that imagined-space-in-which-mutual-verbal-acknowledgment-is-obligatory (let's call it the Dog-pit) whereupon we made eye contact, put on expressions somewhere between surprise and appreciation, and said some very inconsequential things. 

I can't remember what I said, but I do remember being unable to remember what I said immediately after I said it, and worrying, "did I actually say something or just think it? If I did say something, was it coherent? What language did I use? Did I use language or just leak phatic drool?" The realization that I was asking myself these questions begged other, more urgent questions: "Who in their right mind asks themselves whether they just said 'good morning' or whatever it was I said after they say it? Is the mind really that divorced from the body?"

This only happens when I have a coffee hangover, which is often. HOWEVER! like most withdrawal symptoms, The Hush can be squelched by imbibing at least six cups of espresso, after which one can enjoy acute benefits of caffeine, the cause of the hang over, or what I call being jazzed--the acute euphoria, verbal diarrhea, synesthetic genius of intellect and discernment, and impulse to disco that visits the coffee drinker--for a short while before the coffee hangover and its hand-maiden, The Hush, come back to haunt the caffeine addict the next day. Although I have been drinking coffee almost daily for maybe four years now, I currently work for a magazine about coffee, (well, really coffee, tea, and ice cream) which is either really convenient or unhealthy, depending on what time of day it is.

Ineluctable Beauty

This is when something grabs you by the gut and flushes your brain clean of chatter and you feel a little queazy, helpless, like your going to cry. You want to hug, kiss, or destroy, immediately, whatever it is that has seized you. This feeling can get confused with any number of feelings, like pity: when you're in 5th grade watching the 4th grade class perform Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat--the boys' faces are caked with stage-makeup, their sullen smirks distancing their selves from their characters--they watch each others' feet and bump shoulders as the music pulls them through an over-rehearsed yet still shoddily executed choreography. There, in that world, the year of 1998, in the cradle of that school auditorium, in that play, that song and dance number (Go Go Go, Joseph), in those uncoordinated shuffles and garishly painted faces, you would have experienced this thing called ineluctable beauty; a stab, a flash of the whole spectrum of experience: the pain, pleasure, injustice, serendipity, and forgetfulness we and the world cause each other, reified, exploding on stage, a frustrated paroxysm of teen-insecurity, an insidious rebellion to the circus of life that awaited you and every other student in that room.  You might not have been (or never be) able to put words to that emotion, to that experience, as you would have been thrown between other, more familiar, all-too-simplistic and misleading words that would miss the mark entirely, so you land on pity, and, surprisingly, do your best to conceal a tear that comes more from a place of confusion and exaltation than sadness.