I’m an adventurous girl. Always on the lookout for the new and exciting. Always willing to try new things, taste new tastes, grab the bull by the horns and, with a big hearty “Yeehah!” plunge myself into uncharted waters. Undaunted in the face of new experiences, I am. Willing to take on a new challenge, I am.
So just last week, I took a bull by the horns and took myself for a ride. The bull in question was quite literal: the sugar-free variety of the popular “energy” drink, Red Bull. I’d had the original, regular Red Bull a while ago, hoping to reap some of the decaffeinated benefits that had been so broadly celebrated by caffiends far and wide, but, like most things that have been given a hearty two thumbs up by the general populace, I found it seriously lacking.
The sugar-free variety, like its sugar-full counterpart, was impotent. I expected that something that tasted like a blend of an off-brand of tropical fruit punch into which someone’s witless mother mixed half a can of Tab® and a handful of Sweet ‘n Low would at least have some redeeming value, but I was wrong. (Rarely am I, as you know, but in this instance I’m not ashamed to be wrong, and thus my free admission.) I choked down this hideous concoction, and then waited in earnest for it to work.
I am, by nature, intensely impatient, so it was with a great deal of fidgeting that I waited for a half hour. Then an hour. Two hours passed, and I was still just standing around whistling, my palms upturned, shoulders shrugged, still anticipating some sort of zippiness flowing through my veins or a warm tingly sensation as my synapses fired off left and right, to and fro, hither and yon, zip zap ZOW!, ricocheting off one another like pinballs against Tommy’s supercharged flippers. Or dazzling fireworks colliding against one another in some sort of apocalyptic Independence Day free-for-all explosion a-go-go-a-rama.
“This is bullshit,” I said, and made myself a big glass of iced coffee.
Maybe I’ve been desensitized to the effects of this sort of low-grade stimulation. Maybe the super-strong coffee that we enjoy so much in this apartment has ruined me for all other sorts of stimulus. Maybe this is like the stuff I’ve read in columns devoted to sexual dysfunction, where the advice-giver tells frustrated, climax-challenged chicks not to expect the same sort of stimulation from their partners as they enjoy from their battery-operated apparatus.
Or maybe, just maybe, Red Bull is just bullshit!