How to Spot an Addiction

Most of us, if we're honest, have at least one addiction. I have at least three:

Caffeine: Here we have the usual symptoms: headache, slight tremor (I said it was an addiction!) and incessant yawning.

The day of Thomas’s triathlon, I was so worried that there wouldn’t be enough parking that I most reluctantly drove past the only Peet’s I’d seen for miles. My reward was a half-empty parking lot and all of the above-mentioned symptoms. I had no caffeine until Thomas had finished the triathlon and grabbed a Red Bull for me. My first. If it weren’t all sugar, I could easily see getting hooked on that—I felt all sparkly after the first, so of course I had a second. I hear there’s a diet version . . .

Chocolate: See above, minus the yawning, add in extreme daily craving.

I grew up a Catholic and, every year, I would give up chocolate for Lent. And every year I would fail. Perhaps subconsciously I knew that I was not, in fact, a Catholic, though a friend of my mother’s tried to convince me that I would make a marvelous nun.

I’ll wait until you’ve finished laughing.



So how bad is the chocolate addiction? Trader Joe’s sells chocolate covered edamame. I saw it for the first time yesterday and, after my initial “Eeww,” I went back and considered. After all, I’ve never had chocolate covered edamame. And it was Chocolate Covered. In the end I decided against it, but not so much because of the Eeww factor, but because I still have a perfectly good box of chocolate covered espresso beans.

Hockey: See above.

I love hockey. Especially playoff hockey. I was in the crowd when the Sharks lost the season opener to the Calgary Flames. It wasn’t great, but it was OK—six games left, and we got to rip the officiating on the way home. The Sharks won game two. But when they lost the third game after blowing a three-goal lead (all three scored on the first three and a half minutes of the first period), I literally felt sick. Not as sick as after the 2004 elections, but sick. Game four, the Sharks scored two goals in the last five minutes for the win. The final goal came with 9.4 seconds left in the game--and when you're curled up in a miserable ball of anxiety lest the Flames score again and send it to overtime, 9.4 seconds feels like an eternity.

I don’t know what I’m going to do when the season is over.

Thank god they don’t make chocolate-covered hockey pucks.

Do they?