Caf-fiend

Y'all. I need you to tell me if this is normal.

I consider myself a morning person. I'm normally awake by 5:15-ish, out of bed by 6 or before, and 99% of the time I don't even need an alarm — unlike my husband, who sets like a gazillion alarms and then spends an hour snoozing them one by one, for reasons I will never understand. 

But like the majority of people, even a morning person like me needs a little kickstart. Because it isn't like I jump out of bed with guns a-blazin', raring to go (OMG I sound like my grandma. Help). It's more like a slow ooze off the mattress punctuated by a bunch of sighs and yawns and cracking joints. 

The problem is, I don't drink coffee. I know ... what a weirdo. I wish I did drink coffee because everybody who likes coffee is, like, obsessed with it. But I have to get my caffeine in some manner, and since an IV drip isn't an option, I just take it in pill form — literally from a generic bottle that says "Caffeine" on the label that I get for like $5 in the vitamin section at Meijer.  

Side note: Curtis acts like I start my day by snorting lines of coke. I perpetually remind him that the dosage of this ONE caffeine pill is 200 mg which is roughly two cups of coffee, and I'm sure he drinks more than that at work. But because it's in pill form, for some reason it's "bad for me" and apparently because I don't like coffee then I don't deserve to get caffeine in any form. Hmmph.

Anyway, I have to admit that he may have this perception because of what caffeine does to me, because it is a little ... tweaker-ish? Once it kicks in, I get an overwhelming compulsion to do ALLLLL THE THINGS (and a belief that I can actually, in fact, get all those things accomplished despite repeated evidence to the contrary). Not only does it wake me up, it gets me moving. For example, yesterday morning as I was taking out the trash, I looked at the boxes of unassembled patio furniture in our garage and thought to myself, "I'm gonna put all that together today!"

(Spoiler alert: our garage is still full of boxes of unassembled patio furniture.)

Then I came into the house and was like, "I'm gonna work out, and then after that, I'm gonna wash all the sheets and blankets and clean the baseboards!" I didn't do all these things, of course; I worked out for fifteen minutes, quit because I was no longer feeling it, and left my sheets and blankets and baseboards unattended to. Sigh. I guess even when the caffeine-fueled compulsion is there, the follow-through is decidedly not. 

In my defense: according to my 23andMe genetic testing, I am apparently an "ultrarapid metabolizer" of caffeine. So it's not technically my fault that caffeine lasts just long enough in my system to make me poop and formulate an unrealistic to-do list, and then peters out faster than my kids when they're asked to do a chore.   

Why am I like this? Is this what caffeine does to normal folks when it's administered via coffee, or is Curtis right and I'm some sort of pill-popping speed freak? I need answers, people.