Tea and sympathy for ex-coffee fiends

My tiny acupuncturist Victoria, whom I affectionately call Sadistic Needle-Poking Dragon Lady only because I know I could take her in a fight, waggled a finger in my face. “No more coffee!” she barked. “It’s bad for your qi!”

Just thinking about it now, I get a chill down my spine. Which would be nicely taken care of by a vanilla nonfat latte, but I digress.

It’s not that I’ve ever been a daily coffee drinker, and I’m certainly not hooked on caffeine. Even when I did while away the hours at my local java joint, I usually drank decaf, unless I really wanted to watch OxyClean infomercials at 3 in the morning. Honestly, it shouldn’t have been a big sacrifice to improve my qi, whatever that is.

So why did I feel so bereft, as if I’d lost my best friend or my Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Pink Drink punch card?

Truth told, coffee has been a good friend to me. It bends over backward to make me happy. Hot summer day? Iced mocha. Brisk fall breezes? Steaming cup of joe. When I’m dieting, it is a nonfat, no-sugar-added, don’t-ask-too-many-questions-about-what’s-in-it concoction. When I’m not, leave me the cream dispenser and I’ll give it back when I’m good and ready. Coffee is anything I need it to be. (This touches the heart deeply when you have a husband who cannot be persuaded to stop leaving little piles of socks all over the house.)

With coffee -- just like an ex-boyfriend or bad reality-TV show -- it’s the little things that count. It’s the roar of the coffee grinder at your local brew joint, the ‘80s hits perfectly programmed to appeal to your aging Gen X heart. It’s the complicated ritual of ordering the stuff. Picking the perfect combination of ingredients is tougher than creating a successful sitcom. Do you go with the soy half-caf latte or do you really want the nonfat decaf cappuccino? Or do you go with the iced mocha, no whipped cream? I’ve had an easier time committing to real estate, but my inner control freak is happy for days afterward.

And then there’s the smell.

Like Pavlov’s dog, I get one sniff of the stuff and, tiny acupuncturist be damned, I’ll find myself careening into the most obnoxiously ubiquitous of coffee pushers, Starbucks, suddenly willing to forgive the sleepless nights, the ridiculous prices and the extra charge for soy milk. “This is love; how could I not see that?” I think, recklessly ordering a venti instead of a grande.

Worse yet, I’ll even flip for ersatz coffee fumes. I recently stood in a Z Gallerie shamelessly huffing a java-scented candle until I realized the salespeople were giving one another surreptitious “You wanna call security or should I?” looks.

Dragon Lady reassured me that I could drink all the tea I desired. This was not reassuring. Coffee, after all, is the HBO of beverages; racy and spirited, it’s just a little naughty but can still be enjoyed in polite company. Tea is PBS. It’s good for your heart, but it will never make it beat faster. I know, all the coffee places are trying to dress the stuff up like coffee, but it’s a little embarrassing. Instead of selling tea on its own limited merits, the caffeine dispensing powers-that-be are trying desperately to convince us that tea is the new coffee, the way MTV tried to con us into buying Britney Spears as the next Madonna. Like that worked.

And so they trot out the usual suspects: black tea, green tea, chai tea, chamomile. Whatever. When tea comes in flavors like Full-Bodied Mocha-Blast Herbal, I might be interested. Most coffee places carry some kind of berry tea smoothie concoction, which sounds about as appealing as a spinach tofu shake. There is no roar of the coffee grinder, no whooshing sound of milk being foamed. Just the sad ploppety-plop of a tea bag being dunked. Please.

Still, the hardest part about giving up coffee is knowing that you’re giving up the last self-indulgent yet socially acceptable addiction around. Really, what else is there? Heroin chic is so 1994, and my nicotine-addicted friends are too busy running (OK, wheezing and speed-walking) away from shrieking secondhand-smoke activists to strike a cool, Marlon Brando-worthy pose with a cigarette. And no one in Los Angeles admits to eating for pleasure anymore, except to convince themselves they really do enjoy carb-free creme brulee (liars). Without that coffee, I might as well become vegan and run a marathon.

But I am trying. The other day I even ventured into a coffee place and ordered, yes, tea. I sat there, watching my sad little tea bag float like a waterlogged newspaper in my cup, painfully aware that everyone around me was sucking down high-octane brew. The smell of it made me ache with longing. And so I am not going to tell Dragon Lady that I stomped up to the counter and ordered a decaf nonfat vanilla latte to go. Qi, shmee.

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Liane Bonin can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.