I just confirmed that it's much easier to think about writing than it is to write.
I hope that this blog will help educate others about narcolepsy and help others recognize narcolepsy symptoms in themselves and others. I hope it helps me become used to seeing my thoughts in print, toughens me up a bit, and helps me appreciate the absurd in life. I hope it helps people to be less quick to judge others.
And now I'm ready to put off writing the first entry. It's 5:20 pm and I've been up since the crack of noon. Had coffee, brunch, started making truffles from chocolate chips and cream and butter (perfect for a low-carb diet), had coffee, played 4 games of mahjong, watched an hour of HGTV, and gathered together my current bills and mail to process. I'm ready for a nap.
Do I want more coffee? I've been drinking coffee since I was five years old. I can pretty much drink coffee any time and still take a nap right away. When we were little, like six or seven years old, my parents trained my next sibling (Rick) and me to take turns making coffee each morning, setting up a lovely silver-plated tray (aluminum) with pot, cups, saucers, teaspoons, sugar and fresh cream (milk). Which we would then carry into their bedroom and present to our sleeping parents. That helped consolidate my coffee-drinking habit. In an age when most people did not have servants, my parents had two miniature butlers.
Coffee tasted good. I drank it with whole milk and sugar for years and years. I could even tolerate instant coffee, if fresh coffee wasn't available. We used an electric percolator for a time, then when we could be trusted to handle boiling water, we made drip coffee in a Farberware stainless steel drip pot. My dad discovered that if you separated the drip section from the bottom of the pot, you would keep a vacuum from forming, and the coffee brewed quicker and more evenly. Rick and I became experts at separating the sections with a spoon or fork balanced on the edge of the pot.
Later I learned to drink coffee with sugar only, no cream. I was reading a lot of psychic stuff at the time. Edgar Cayce, "The Sleeping Prophet," said in one of his books that coffee with cream was bad for you, that stomach acid turned it into poison, but that coffee with sugar, or plain, was fine. So no cream. That lasted a few years, until I decided that the third eye was really the pineal gland, then it was back to milk in the coffee. In the 1980s my husband and I took a camping vacation in Maine, staying at one of Acadia National Park's campgrounds. We would drive into Ellsworth for coffee and breakfast, where we discovered a McDonald's which had a wood-burning stove in the middle of the seating area. More importantly, it was the first McDonald's we had ever been in that served half and half with coffee. We were hooked. Half and half has been a staple in our house ever since then.
By then we disdained instant coffee, percolators and drip pots. We used the Melior french press exclusively. I was still drinking 2-3 cups a day but was losing my taste for the stuff. One day I made coffee and couldn't stand the smell of it. I quit drinking coffee for about six months. I suffered from caffeine-withdrawal headaches daily for weeks, then they got less frequent. I felt very virtuous, no longer dependent on stimulant drugs, however natural, and even began to think about vegetarianism. The only downside was that I was sleepy all the time. Didn't matter how much I slept. I read an article that mentioned a study showing that when coffee-drinkers quit, most of them are fine after the initial withdrawal headaches, but a small percentage will, for some unknown reason, feel uncommonly sleepy most of the time. I decided I was in that small percentage. I went back to coffee.
I started getting better brands of coffee, even buying beans and grinding them myself, Kona, Columbian, French roast, chicory. If I had to have coffee, by gosh, I was going to have good coffee. One day in the 1990s I was given a cup of Starbucks house blend with half and half. It had a much more acidic taste than I was used to, but after a few cups, I was hooked.
My boss called me a coffee snob. He drank about 6 cups a day. The office had a fancy coffee maker with a tiny little water filter. But we used cheap coffee grounds and the boss liked to let the glass carafe sit on the burner all day. I guess his theory was that the caffeine would get more concentrated as the day went by. By 2:00 or 3:00 pm we would have made another pot, which at least meant fresh bad coffee. I can't stand the taste of burned coffee. Won't accept coffee at a restaurant unless they guarantee it is freshly made. And I wash the pot with detergent and hot water before I make a fresh pot. Because the oily burned taste needs to be washed out so it doesn't contaminate the fresh pot of coffee.
My boss's idea of washing the pot was to empty it into the sink and occasionally rinse it with cold water. Then use tap water and cheap coffee to make the next pot. Every part of the coffee maker was stained and crusted with old coffee. It reminded me of Bible history class in the 7th grade. The teacher explained that we didn't need to believe that all miracles were supernatural. In fact many things that looked like miracles might have natural, organic causes that the people who lived at the time were ignorant of, like a seizure disorder that was interpreted as demonic possession.
He elaborated on this using the miracle at Cana as an example. Jesus and his mother were at a wedding in Cana. The host ran out of wine, which was terribly embarassing and inhospitable. Mary told Jesus the problem and asked him to do something about it. So Jesus told the host to put water into the empty wine casks and serve it to the guests. When the water was poured out, it had been turned into wine, very good wine, in fact such good wine that one of the guests said usually the good wine is served first and cheap wine is served later, when the guests are already tipsy, but this host had saved the good wine for last! Our Bible history teacher said it was very possible that the empty wine casks had liquid and/or solid residue from many previous stores of wine, and that the freshly added water could have dissolved all this residue and given it the appearance and taste of wine. I thought of that story every time I saw the dirty coffee maker.
So now it's nearly 8:00 pm. I've taken four phone calls: 1) husband who is proud of himself for turning a broom closet into a cat poo palace complete with exhaust fan into the garage and additional shelves to store cleaning supplies; 2) sister with kidney stone who is in great pain and wants a sympathetic ear; 3) friend who is taking old appliances off our hands; and 4) sister with kidney stone who claims to be feeling much better. Went back to the kitchen to hand roll the cooled truffle mix into little truffle balls. Not easy to do. I made 6, ate 3, and then spent 5 minutes washing my hands with Joy and water as hot as I could take it. That stuff is hard to get off. Ate hummus and crackers. Ate carrot sticks and celery with bleu cheese dressing as dip. I'm about ready for a nap now.
