Last week when I got sick for a day, I stopped drinking coffee. For one thing, it didn’t sound good at the time. But I also traditionally drink way-too-much coffee, so I thought, Give it a rest, Nancy. Well, the first few days were a little rough, but I made it. Now it’s been over a week. Look at me! That being said, I’m not smoking cigarettes, getting laid, or doing any other damn fun thing in my life these days, so I’ve noticed The Void. It’s been tough to hold my head up, especially since I’ve been working the last several nights until four in the morning helping friends pack. Even when I sleep past noon like I did today, I just can’t seem to get enough rest or ever really wake up.

And God knows the GREEN TEA isn’t helping.

At all.

This morning while making breakfast and preparing to toast a THIN bagel, I noticed our butter is UNSALTED, our cream cheese is FAT FREE, and our grape jelly is SUGARLESS. This was the final straw. What the fuck? I thought, as I switched on the coffee maker. Why would someone even want to live in an uncaffeinated world where EVERYTHING tastes like cardboard?!

As if life weren’t challenging enough.

So now I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee in over a week. Feel free to alert the media. And whereas the all-or-nothing part of me thinks that I’m a failure for not “sticking it out,” another part of me thinks coffee DIDN’T sound good last week, but it DOES sound good now. I mean, the seasons change, so why can’t my desires and opinions? But seriously, back to this cup of joe. It’s delicious. I’m glowing.

I feel like a virgin. Touched for the very first time.

Maybe I could try not to overdo it this time, just drink coffee with breakfast instead of all day long. I’ve heard some people do that. I don’t know–moderation isn’t really my bag. I like the all-or-nothing thing, the extremes. Sure, it’s more dramatic, but who doesn’t like a little drama?

Sometime last year there was a dance move called The Backpack Kid that went viral thanks to Katy Perry’s performance on Saturday Night Live (SNL). The move is a little difficult to explain in writing, but it essentially boils down to swinging your hips from side to side while swinging your arms in the the opposite direction. (The complicated part is that every other time, one of your arms goes behind your back.) Anyway, the move is super fun, and during my last trip to Nashville (and after a few beers), I finally figured out how to do it. Yippee!

Recently I was watching an interview with the teenage kid who made the move famous, and the interviewer asked him why he thought kids could do the move faster and therefore look better doing it than adults. Well, the little shit said something like, “Kids are more agile. Old people are brittle and can’t move as well.” And whereas that’s “sort of” true and SOUNDS like a good answer, I DISAGREE. Think about it. A child is smaller than an adult. Their hips are like eight inches from side to side. An adult’s, on the other hand, are like forty-five. (I obviously exaggerate.) But the point is that the move requires taking your hips from one side to the other. Because a child has LESS DISTANCE to travel, they can bounce back and forth faster than a bunny rabbit can hop across your front lawn. However, since an adult has MORE DISTANCE to travel, the back-and-forth takes them longer.

It’s just physics.

I guess there’s two ways of seeing The Backpack Kid. A shorter distance means a faster movement, which–granted–is fun to look it. There’s a certain “yee-haw” quality about it. It’s flashy. But a longer distance, despite its slower movement, means A LONGER DISTANCE. What’s more, the distance traveled becomes MORE OBVIOUS. (Wow! I went from HERE to THERE.) This is what I like about having wider hips. Maybe they don’t move as fast as a teenager’s, but their movements are clear. They’re distinct. They’re powerful. Likewise, this is what I like about the all-or-nothing thing. It’s easier to SEE MOVEMENT when there are extremes. Not that I’m suddenly against moderation and balance (I’m not), but it is easier to NOTE CHANGE when there’s summer on one end of calendar and winter on the other. And I imagine this is how we all spend our lives–moving from one extreme to the other. Some of us move a little less, faster; some of us move a lot more, slower. But all of us, it appears, are dancing.