Symphony Number 1 in B# (The Coffee Symphony)

Time for another installment of "I must be doing it wrong." Jitters are the scourge of the business class, according to the New York Times Style section. (No I don't have a link. And I never read the article. But you just *know* they wrote it.) But I'm pretty sure I've never been jittery.

I've never been so energetic that it upset me. That's what jitteriness is, right? Most people claim that if they drink too much coffee, they become "jittery" and "anxious" and irritable. That doesn't seem to happen to me. Not to expose you to unwanted personal details, but if I drink a lot of coffee, I become nauseated and sweaty. People also say that other things make them antsy -- quitting cigarettes, or quitting heroin, or menstrual cycles -- but I don't have any experience with those.

More to the point, though, why is over-excitement bad? I suppose the answer could be a brute "It's bad because it makes you feel bad; don't try to argue with my conscious experience." But I get the impression, from talking to caffeine survivors, that perhaps jitteriness is bad because it makes you scatterbrained and inattentive. I don't really know, of course; asking people about their conscious experiences is confusing. It seems unlikely that being wide awake and energetic, the state of mind in which great symphonies are written, and people are at their most charming, could be bad. All I know is that I never feel unpleasantly stimulated when I drink coffee. The rest of you... gosh, I don't know. Maybe next time, try composing a symphony.