By Ruel S. De Vera
Associate Editor

WITH my addiction to the glorious liquid perfection that is Mountain Dew, I basically have caffeine running in my veins, to the point where it really doesn’t have any discernable effect on me—except when I wake up early in the morning.

Like many others, I wake up a clean slate, a blank page, a husk of a person until I grab breakfast and my first drink of MD. Then, I feel myself steadily becoming human, like the caffeine is unlocking that part of me that makes me who I am. I like that state of semi-buzz, and I like to be in it the whole day.

Because I already imbibe so much caffeine through my MD dosage, I don’t drink coffee. In fact, I never did, but I hold coffee drinkers in affection because they basically go through the same things I do, except their drinks are steaming hot, come in a size called venti and sometimes even have warning labels.

Watching someone take their first drink of coffee in the morning is the perfect example of a BEFORE and AFTER ad. It’s like a zombie literally waking to life, complete with the grunts and moaning, the shuffling and the lack of normal human faculty until that first cup.

When I was younger, coffee was virtually forbidden for kids. Back then, our coffee was different—it came in Nescafe, Blend 45 and Great Taste varieties only. We would be surprised to find out anyone our age drank coffee. It was something only grownups did. Even in college, few of us drank coffee. Hot Milo or Ovaltine was much the preferred drink in the morning from the vending machine or, if you had the time to get it, that piping hot chocolate from McDonalds. There was nothing the least bit glamorous about coffee.

How times have changed. Today, grade school children quaff coffee (in frap form) like it’s water. People nurse their grandes at coffee shops the same way other people nurse a bottle of beer at bars. It is a mark of class to be carrying around that distinctive paper cup while you carry out the day’s duties.

Coffee is here to stay and in the process, we see a society changed as well. We are now a 24-hour culture, people by call center employees as well as coffee consumers. Coffee is now taking all times of the day, for waking up, staying up and, well, for any other reason.

I’ll stick with my MD. Coffee never agreed with me, but I own up to being one of the coffee generation. We are caffiends, every single one of us, and the world is our cup.

Read about the joys of coffee in the August 16, 2009 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.