Coffee

My coffee-drinking age is pretty young; I've really only been imbibing for a about a year and a half, which isn't long. It amazes me, though, how much I enojy coffee these days. I can be having a horrible day and then sit down with a cup of quality coffee and feel lovely.

My dad always praised my non-coffee-drinking, telling me "Don't start any bad habits you don't already have." It's good advice, and it's probably part of why I never started smoking. The problem in my mind is that drinking coffee isn't a bad habit in any way.

In fact, before I embarked on my quest to begin liking coffee (I started with the mocha and worked my way to plain coffee), I researched it to make sure it wouldn't be a bad habit. I'm in school, sometimes I need to stay up realy late, and really, I wanted to get my caffiene in the healthiest way possible. Now, because Wikipedia is the end all of internet sources, I checked out their page on coffee and found that while it has a couple minor negative effects, it has many more good ones. You can look at it all right here.

To me, the greatest danger in coffee drinking seems to be this:

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - It wasn't just the caffeine that gave an Iowa woman an extra jolt after she had her morning coffee. It was also the bat she found in the filter.

The Iowa Department of Public Health says the woman reported a bat in her house but wasn't too worried about it. She turned on her automatic coffee maker before bedtime and drank her coffee the next morning.

She discovered the bat in the filter when she went to clean it that night. The woman has undergone treatment for possible rabies.

Health officials say that the bat was sent to a lab but that its brain was too cooked by the hot water to determine whether it had rabies.

Coffee? Generally safe, but sometimes with some extra protein and a side of rabies.