The further adventures of caffeine

I should probably start a caffeine blog, except that it would be boring. Even writing about it on this one isn't all that fascinating, but it'll have to suffice.

So this morning I did feel the yen to go to Starbucks, probably because my inflatable mattress fell on me at 2:30 this morning and it was one of those things that freaked me out gradually rather than immediately, since at first I wasn't conscious enough to register a sufficient amount of terror. My thought process went something like this.

1. Oh, I woke up.
2. I woke up for a reason, right?
3. Yes, I woke up because I heard something.
4. I guess something fell over.
5. What fell over? And why would it fall?
6. Yeah, what the hell was that? My feet can't reach far enough to knock anything over.
7. I better look up.
8. Holy shit, what's that on the edge of my bed? I can't tell what it is but it's big.
9. Oh, it's the inflatable mattress I propped up against the closet door last night.
10. That was pretty weird. I should go back to sleep.

So there was that. And at Starbucks this morning I got an iced green tea with lemonade, because it's so freaking hot out that the thought of any kind of coffee-related beverage, even in iced form, is somewhat of a turn-off. Besides, green tea has anti-oxidants. In Scientology terms, oxidants are like thetans. You want to get rid of them. Except you only have to pay like $2 for green tea, instead of like $20,000 for the Scientology counseling sessions that get rid of your thetans. But I think it's desirable to hold onto at least a few oxidants, because if you drink too much green tea and get rid of all of them you just might end up jumping up and down on Oprah's couch.

Anyway, after lunch I decided that there probably wasn't all that much caffeine in the green tea/lemonade thing so I opted for a Pepsi Edge, the recipe for which is: Take one regular Pepsi, remove half the sugar, replace with Splenda. It's exactly half, too. Was that a coincidence? Because they claim it's "full flavor" (which it's not, really, but who cares), and it just seems a little odd that 50% was the magic amount of Splenda they could substitute without ruining the taste. Did they try 51% and decide that was too much? At 49% there was still room for improvement? I think it would have been much more interesting if they'd been perfectly honest and said something like, "56.72% less sugar, 86% of the flavor, but 76% of survey recipients say they don't miss that other 14% and besides, among the subgroup who did miss the flavor, 24% voted for a write-in candidate in the 2004 election and what kind of normal person does that anyway?"

But that's just the tip of the iceberg of how things would be different if I ran the soft drink industry.