She finally broke me.

After more than 29 years of swimming against the stream, Katie has now turned into me kinda, sorta, maybe drinking coffee.

I’m not proud of it.

I did it because I got money for doing it. We were having breakfast at a local … breakfast place, and I was most likely complaining about how tired I was when Katie offered me a dollar to drink an entire cup of coffee.

Challenge accepted.

I poured some creamer and a few sugars into it, and, to be honest, it was actually pretty bad. I grimaced with every gulp, but I didn’t want to get halfway through and throw in the towel – only to watch that coveted dollar sprout wings and fly away. I found whatever strength I had within myself and eventually finished the whole thing.

Cut to soon after that, we were at another breakfast place – I mean, it was like a week later. We didn’t go to another place right away to get a second breakfast. Just to make that clear. Considering I will go to extreme lengths for a laugh, I thought it would be funny if I surprised her by ordering a cup of coffee for that “Look at you!” expression on her face.

The joke, it appears, was on me.

This happened a few more times before the joke was gone. I wasn’t ordering coffee in some ironic way – you can take the boy out of Portland, but you can’t take the Portland out of the boy. Instead, I was just ordering it.

A few clarifications: I don’t drink coffee every day. Also, according to studies on the Internet, there are some health benefits to coffee. There are lower cases of stroke and heart issues in coffee drinkers, and there are health benefits for the liver, and God knows I put my liver through enough punishment that I should probably help it out a little bit.

I hope that I don’t end up like a trucker at a diner that orders his coffee black as coal and fills up his Big Gulp-sized thermos with it while he goes about his day. As far as settling into a nice chai tea latte, I legitimately think it tastes good, and I can’t help but compare it to my first alcohol experience.

I had made a promise to a friend in high school – for the sake of anonymity, let’s call him Alex – that if we won the state championship in baseball our senior year, I’d have one beer. After we won, I lived up to my end of the bargain and was in the back seat of his car (there was someone in the passenger seat; I wasn’t just sitting in the back with Alex behind the wheel). Again, to avoid betraying any confidences, let’s call the person in the passenger seat Charlie. When I popped open a Coors Light. I took a sip and it was honestly one of the worst things I’ve ever tasted in my life.

Just in case, Alex brought a Smirnoff Ice, which isn’t exactly the most masculine drink around. Begrudgingly, I took a sip of that.

Hey, not too bad.