I'm not really sure what that means, though I'm reasonably certain I should.

But I do have moments where I get lost in myself asking myself some strange or off the wall questions.

Take today for an example. Here I am at a local grocery store helping to pick up some cakes that were ordered by members of the management team at work (though I was the one who had to actually call and place the order *wry grin*) when I happened to notice a guy with his forehead smudged.

*blink blink*

Light breaks through the clouds and illuminates the darkness.

Today is Ash Wednesday!

So I started to think about what I would give up for Lent. (At this moment I feel the need to pause and to point out for anyone unaware of the fact that I do not really consider myself Catholic, even though I was baptised Catholic when I was in swaddling clothes and have been inside of a Catholic church maybe a total of 5 times in my entire life)

A lot of the immediate obvious choices sprang to mind, but I reminded myself that the whole point of Lent as I understand it is to give up something that you would have difficulty giving up. And I had to really work at trying to find something that I couldn't give up if I truly set my mind to it. I had long ago proved that to myself when I made the decision to walk away from caffeine.

It wasn't really a new years resolution even though it started on my birthday. It wasn't for health reasons. There were no great and demanding reasons trying to force me to give up caffeine that typically would cause a stubborn mule response and cause me to dig in and become obstinate.

I wanted to prove something to myself. I did it for really no other reason. I needed to take more control of myself and my life and a small part of a conversation that I had held with someone several years previously drifted into my mind at the time. This person was telling me about how caffeine was the most addictive legal substance available.

I was going through about 4 twenty packs of Mountain Dew a week. An ongoing joke at the time was about how the blood level of my caffeine stream was getting too high while I popped open a new can.

Since that day I have not ever intentionally imbibed any liquid that had caffeine in it. Once I learned that chocolate had caffeine in it then my chocolate intact dropped almost to nil. It takes almost an act of congress... or caramel to get me to partake of dark or milk chocolate nowadays (white chocolate macadamia nut cookies was a quilty pleasure until I found out that white chocolate isn't really chocolate and I could have as much as I wanted... *sigh*)

But when I examine the deeper reasons in my motivations for the decisions I made in my life, I have to ponder and go "hmmm"

And I eventually did come up with something I could give up for Lent... But I had to be honest with myself and realize that it was already technically too late that I had already screwed up on it... But then I can just shrug and remind myself that I am not a catholic *grin*

So I bought myself a package of peanut butter covered chocolate brownies.

And I refuse to have any of the cake.

Despite having had to spend almost an hour "guarding" the cake while it sat out in the break room until the senior executive in the building got out of her meeting and could come and put her personal stamp of approval on the cake.

For someone who has to drag himself every morning to make the conscious and aware decision to come into work and to be prepared to deal with what the day can bring, guarding a cake just isn't the kind of thing I would think of when I am looking for reasons to go to work in the morning.

So after I break policy and send this blog from work, I am going to take a bite of my chocolate brownie that I bought for myself and ponder just what I am doing here.

Edit: going over the formatting and checking out the post after I get home (Since emailing a blog always tends to be hit or miss on how its going to format, and I doubt I can get away with downloading the add ons to MS Word for blogger at work *evilgrin*) I realized that there is an important piece of information that I strongly feel I should share about my walking away from caffeine cold turkey (since even before I found out about chocolate it wasn't a big part of my life anyways)...

I never went through withdrawal symptoms.

And I quite definitely had been having caffeine as a significant presence in my life for about as long as I think back about it... Maybe not to the degree that I was just before I walked away from it, but definitely enough to have met the qualifications necessary to become addicted to it.

Oh and the brownie that I ate with "Malice Aforethought" was sinfully delicious *evilgrin*... I had two!