It's Not Soylent Green Tea... It's People!

Yesterday was not a typical Monday after a not so typical weekend. Friday night, Dave and I celebrated the completion of his two-day directorial debut. (He just shot a short sizzle reel for an upcoming feature film he wrote and will direct and yee-haw and more to come on that slice of awesome!) We hung hard and long with two of our nearest and dearest buds, Ashley and Bobby and the makers of movie magic. Ashley, a producer extraordinaire, worked non-stop and called in every favor, smoke-signaled every past life and sky-wrote a long, languid letter to her peeps in the business who wanted to help out Dave and his baby budget and work for free. The cameras were top of the line, the lighting was Michael Bay-Norma Desmond delicious, the catering was sublimely sumptuous and the port-a-potties were nicer than most CEO powder rooms on the west coast of Waikiki.

Meanwhile, Bobby took multiple days off work to do anything and everything to make sure the shoot ran as smoothly as a tub of Pinkberry Green Tea fro-yo melting down the cigarette-singed throat of a newly minted Hollywood “Was It” girl. It was a lesson in loyalty, friendship and true grit that I will forever clutch close to my blackened, beat-skipping heart. I can only try to repay them in off-colored jokes and Dave’s hand rolled Tagliatelli. I have nothing else to give, unless, of course, they want me to nap for them. That I can do.

While our celebratory evening was an A+, the results were far from the desired ninety-ninth percentile. I do not recall consuming more than two beers and a glass and a half of an excellent Cake Bread chardonnay. But, the next morning said otherwise and proved to be as challenging as the second time I took the SAT’s without studying. I woke up Saturday feeling like BP had relocated their treacherous off-shore drilling into my left frontal lobe and were well on their way to destroying my natural eco-system as well. The pain was so excruciating, in fact, that while I was down I decided to kick myself in the temple with a well-worn Payless Shoe Source heel spike. In the throes of a college worthy hangover I, poor choice-maker extraordinaire, decided to take the painful opportunity handed to me by both my frothy fists the night before and give up caffeine and sugar while suffering a severe case of the Bukowski’s.

The last five days have been a hairy haze of cold sweats, dizzying and unintentional living room pirouettes, electrifying eyeball aches and odd moments of euphoric flights of fancy. I am not a coffee drinker and my husband was shocked to hear I felt I had a caffeine addiction. That is until he looked in the back of my gas guzzling SUV and saw a sea of empty iced tea containers waiting to be put into the proper recycling bin. Even with my crafty fifty-cent refills and my obsession with reusing the polluting plastic I was still consuming enough green tea to fuel a Kurosawa samurai sword fight before noon each day.

And for the record, Starbuck’s green tea is not the good shit that the people of Okinawa drink, the same people who live well into their one hundreds because of a seaweed, green tea and all fish diet. It is not healthier than coffee or less caffeinated than black tea or Jolt cola. It is pumped full of pulverized No-Doze and crushed up crack rocks and is as harmful as falling asleep smoking an unfiltered Pall Mall on a pee-stained queen-sized Serta with a gun powder-packed Civil War musket.

And as far as the sugar, I haven’t emotionally or physically crossed that sweet, crunchy glazed bridge yet. I am too busy white knuckling my water glass and giving every Starbucks in my neighborhood the finger when I pass by their titillating green 1990’s font that screams, “Corporate rapist.” And yes, my fingers are fucking killing me.