Morning:

I now stop at coffee shops and coffee drive-thrus before I go almost every place that I go except the gym. I leave early to accomplish this. The thing that makes it so ridiculous is that I’m just getting coffee– normal coffee. I have a cupboard full of high-quality coffee as well as many very pretty travel mugs to put it in. What I do not have is half & half.

Ever since that stupid museum, I can’t get enough half & half. Its like the thing that was missing that I didn’t know was missing and now that it’s in my life, I can’t let it go. I crave it hourly. I watched MTV True Life “I’m Obese” once (okay more than once), and one of the girls carried around a bottle of ranch in her purse. Maybe she started out like this. I don’t even know what it is; half & half of what & what? I’m now drinking 3 times as much coffee as before and scheming how to get another coffee while I’m still in the middle of drinking one. It’s like crack…. I imagine.

So now that I’ve admitted that I have a problem, I should do something about it right? Well, I don’t want to. Despite the shame, I love everything about this. I love drinking a scandalous amount of coffee. For some reason, the half & half tempers the acidity of the coffee, so I get big, wide-awake eyes, and unflappable ambition without the shaking. This is what I’ve been waiting for my entire life.

Now, my dilemma is: should I save money and buy some half & half for the home so I can feed my addiction more economically? or do I keep frequenting coffee vendors to get my fix? Frugality, obviously, dictates that buying a $.75 carton of half and half is the sensible thing to do, but the idea of buying half & half is appalling to me still.

It’s horrifying that I’m spending so much time and energy thinking about/ writing about this problem, but my excessive consumption of coffee has given me way too much energy, which makes obsessing about this not really a problem at all– just pretty embarrassing. I have never been more productive– maybe more like I’ve rarely been more productive, either way, this is the most productive I’ve been in recent memory. Maybe my stupid coffee pride has been holding me back.

Afternoon:

Frugality won out as I wrote down my monthly expenses and weighed then against my monthly income. Pretty bleak. I purchased my very first carton of half & half ever today at Cashwise Grocery. I didn’t even know where to find it–dairy case, obviously– but the dairy case it a pretty big area and half & half cartons are very small. Is it next to the cream cheese? I wondered. Cream cheese being another thing I only recently purchased for the first time, and couldn’t find in the moment.

Half & half section discovered, I was faced with the overwhelming different varieties. Fat-free (scary), gourmet (what?), green carton, tan carton. I settled for good old Cass-Clay because their cottage cheese has never let me down. Now I just have to get up the courage to open the stupid thing and use it.