Monday Musing: Weekend Coffee

I ended up frosting the cake late last night instead of early this morning. It was very well received, almost disappearing before quitting time. A colleague went so far as to put a slice in a styrofoam coffee cup so he could eat it on the way home. I'm not sure it's a good thing when partners tell me I should give up being a lawyer and become a baker.

I have a confession, I made it through law school without drinking coffee. This makes me a virtual leper in the legal community but I had good reason. When I graduated from college I was drinking three or four red bull a day. The summer prior to law school, I slowly weened myself off all forms of caffeine, so that when classes begun I wouldn't be completely resistant to its stimulant effects. I figured that I'd need caffeine to be effective because I'd spend countless hours studying. Well it turns out that law school isn't all that hard and, at least in my experience, didn't require me to study outside of normal business hours on more than a handful of occasions. So I never picked the habit back up. I resumed drinking coffee when forced to get up early to study for the bar (getting up early was a function of when the Bar Bri lectures started and not because I actually needed to get up early in the morning to study, I was mostly done and lying near the pool by 2 or 3pm).

After I took (and passed!) the bar, I gave up coffee again. But I started again when I began my current job. This was initially because our office brews freshly roasted, freshly ground organic coffee, which makes any coffee you've ever had taste bad in comparison. It is truly the best coffee I've ever had. Soon I was drinking coffee every day, which lead to the inevitable caffeine resistance/addiction. Which brings me around to my point.

Recently I've begun grinding and brewing coffee on the weekend. While I use far cheaper coffee, I'm quite neurotic about my grinding and brewing and achieve a similar, though no doubt lesser, result. But there's something different about drinking coffee on the weekend. During the week coffee has become a means to a sleepy end. It is hurriedly sipped while skimming my messages and trying to figure out how to get someone to pay for the next 8 hours of my time. But on the weekend, when savored and consumed at my leisure, it's relaxing. It's almost as if it has a completely opposite effect when the day starts with "S". Why is that?