It’s morning and you’re enjoying breakfast at a diner. The food is greasy and tasty. You can feel your energy for the day building and you’re excited that you decided to eat here.  In fact, you’re so thrilled by the experience that you fail to keep tabs on an important factor.  This place has bottomless coffee.

Most diners do, in fact.

The kind waiter / waitress swings by your table every few minutes and offers to top off your cup.  You’re eating salty foods, and so you keep needing more to drink, so of course you say “Sure, fill ‘er up.”

Generally, this endless stream of coffee is a good thing. It should be up to you to decide how much you want to drink.  That said, it’s risky business. With the constant refilling, the fact that most fills are not quite  a full cup and not quite a half-cup, it is quite easy to lose track of just how much coffee you’ve imbibed.  Before you know it, you could be 48 oz of coffee in and none the wiser!

So as you lift that next piece of delicious bacon off your plate and prepare to enjoy chomping down on it, watch out for that shaky hand or sudden loss of ability to focus your attention, that could be the sign that you may need to switch to water.

Notable Exception: To our friend who sports six coffee cups on his/ her desk at work, we’re pretty sure this danger is not going to be an issue for you.

It’s obvious that I need to add “English midnight study session tea” to my tea collection, but I wonder if you have any other suggestions in addition?

Specifically, this one request seems more than a small amount unreasonable to me.

I suspect that many others feel the same way, as there was no massive pile of food deposited on the floor outside. I sure wasn’t about to surrender my lunch to the faceless person requesting that all food and drinks in the world be left outside.

Let them do their own shopping!

If it were Chinese tea, maybe I’d give it a break. Or if the flavor morphed, I would have been surprisingly fulfilled. But of course, it didn’t, and I was left to slurp leaf dumplings.

Oh the lengths we’ll go for free ($3 tea) wi-fi…

When overseas, it’s always great when everything is written in your language except for the most expensive option. Can anyone guess what is in this crazy Kenyan fruit smoothie?

And yes, I just bought it and it is scrumdidiliumptious.

I was surprised to see that Pabst Blue Ribbon is now sponsoring NPR via its iPhone app. Do opera-attending, left-leaning, cultural elitists really slug back cans of PBR?

Why is it that plain ordinary tea looks so much more enticing, enigmatic, delicious and even exotic when served in a clear glass vessel than in an opaque mug?

Note: In drafting this post, we realized that the phrase “through the looking glass” is much more interesting than “looking through the glass.” Just thought you might like to ponder that as well.

As you can see in the image above, I received an anonymous text message today offering to share with me the details of my secret admirer. I could get the details for $9.99! Crikey! If it costs that much just to get the name and phone number, I can only imagine what the first date will cost. No, thank you!

Let me give you an example. Nearly five years ago, I went out for buffalo wings and a beer with some friends and family. We went to a local watering hole here in Chicago. Much to my surprise, the wings were so delicious, meaty, well-seasoned and low-cost that even now I can recall exact details about the dish.

What I did not realize at the time, however, is that experiencing those great tasting wings was going to have seriously ruinous effects on all my subsequent wing-eating experiences. Because the standard for greatness is now set so high, all other wings simply fall short. Even if I am enjoying really good buffalo wings now, there is still a bit of disappointment that they are not as good as they could be.

This terrible side effect of great things ruining good things probably carries over into many aspects of life. Has it ever happened to you?