This is me in the crowd at Pike Place Market in 2008, on the day that Starbucks introduced its Pike Place Roast. CEO Howard Schultz is signing autographs in the foreground.

While on a recent business trip, I made some coffee in my hotel using the coffee maker next to the television.

The Starbucks packets seemed designed especially for the hotel brewer. On check out, I braced myself, expecting to be charged something outrageous.

I got my bill and scanned it. “There’s no charge for the coffee on here,” I told the hotel clerk.

“Oh, no charge for that,” he said.

“Wait, so, the coffee is free?” I asked. “But you charge for drinking the bottled water in the fridge?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

My goodness, I thought, in our society, coffee is considered more necessary than water.

The first time that I met Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, I didn’t know the difference between an espresso and a brew.

And I didn’t even know enough about coffee to know that it was something I should have known.

Maybe it was fitting that as a business reporter, I wasn’t already a fan of the company or its main product. That was more than two years ago. That was before I traded in my daily Diet Cokes for daily coffees.

It occurred to me early on in my career that caffeine was more necessity than luxury if I wanted to make something of myself in modern society. In fact, coffee and tea surged in popularity at the advance of the industrial revolution. (One of the best articles I’ve read on humanity’s dependence upon caffeine is by National Geographic. Check it out here.)

By the time I was a full-time college student, spending long nights writing up physics experiment reports and spending my days working for FDIC in Arlington, Va., I was consuming 32 ounces of regular Coca-Cola per day.

One day, my boss’s boss saw me at my desk with one: My mouth connected to a giant red and white cup via straw. “Do you know how much sugar is in that?” he said. “You’re going to get so fat if you keep drinking that. Switch to diet.”

And, so, I switched to diet. It was difficult at first, because I didn’t like the taste. But then, addiction set in. Diet Coke became “liquid goodness.”

Here I am in Amsterdam in 2007, drinking a "Coca-Cola Light," which is the non-US version of Diet Coke.

I developed a Pavlovian response to the sight of that cold silver can, the feel of its weight in my hands, the cracking sound of the tab — oh, addicts, do you feel me? I would tuck a Diet Coke can behind my feet under my church pew. You’d never find me without a can in my hand. I bonded with news sources over this shared addiction.

Coffee, meanwhile, seemed gross. Who knows what they put in that?

Starbucks taught me exactly what.

Because Starbucks is a brand that must maintain a positive public image, it employs a powerful team of public relations staff. The team struck me as particularly competent at what it did — the staff works hard to educate reporters about the company, and more importantly, about coffee.

I grew up in in a working class New Jersey household. Morning joe meant pouring boiling water over a scoop of Maxwell House instant. My parents kept Sweet’N Low packets in a dish on the table, next to the salt and pepper shakers. And my mother kept a white cannister of saccharin tablets next to her purse, for her morning tea. (As a child, I thought that men drank coffee and women drank tea.)

On a day-long immersion tour of Starbucks, I learned the difference between low-quality robusta and high-quality arabica beans, I saw the labs where the company’s scientists determined which temperatures brought out the best flavors, and I learned about distribution and marketing and product sourcing. (Did you know that the Japanese are the largest consumers of instant coffee? They sell it in machines over there like they do soda here.)

Before that day, I’d thought that coffee beans came brown. I learned that they are plucked off of the trees green and then roasted brown.

For some reason, I’d always thought that coffee was engineered from man-made chemicals. I realized that coffee is as natural as salad. It’s water run through roasted beans. It fit into my decision to make simpler and healthy lifestyle choices.

In October 2009, I officially made the switch to coffee as my main source of caffeine.

I use a French press in the morning. How about you?

The second law, regarding entropy, is my favorite. It is simple to understand: It states that in any system, anything that happens tends to increase the entropy of the universe.

This is how I see it: My messy desk is not my fault. The forces of nature and mathematics are working against me.

Consider this: In the human realm of homes and offices, every object has its place. And there is only one way for each object to be in its place. However, there are  infinite ways for objects to be out of place.

So, it’s simple probability that things would be out of place. The “proper” way for my keyboard to exist is without crumbs underneath the keys. However, food makes crumbs and I eat at my desk and it only takes one crumb to ruin this proper state.

Getting something from its chaotic state to its proper state takes energy. It takes work. All of human existence is a constant battle to control nature, to bring elements into their proper places, to maintain our man-made systems, to fight back the chaos and maintain order. Much of our work is either maintaining existing proper states or creating new ones. (What is a smart phone but a collection of properly arranged elements?)

In the wilderness, the law still applies, but humans don’t try to fight it and so we notice its effect less. Say I moved a rock from here to there in the woods. Have I made the woods more “messy?” No, “messy” is a human construct. Nature is constantly changing and the squirrels don’t need to have all of the woodland objects just so.

Anyway, I spend great portions of my time either cursing the second law (like when light bulbs burn out or the toilet flush system decays) and thanking it for taking the blame off of me.

So, I was cheered to see today that the laws of thermodynamics  may be blamed for something else: Gravity.

It turns out, gravity may not even exist. It may just be a construct of these laws.

“Differences in entropy can be the driving mechanism behind gravity, that gravity is, as he puts it an ‘entropic force,’” writes the New York Times’ Dennis Overbye, who has the story about Erik Verlinde, a physicist in Amsterdam promoting the new theory.

Check it out.

I spent hours of my childhood crouched down and hunched over the backyard bugs — so much so that the adults would joke that one day I would be an entomologist.

Eventually, I chose other professions ending in -ist, but still, the hours I’d spent in a New Jersey suburb, watching the insects, shaped me.

I would pick up an ant from the red colony and march him to another part of our yard and drop him into the black colony. And he would, inevitably, run away quickly. I’d try to stuff him down the hole — the entry to the ant hill. Usually when I did this, the alien ant would run out a few seconds later. Sometimes, he never made it out.

My aim was to see if ants from different colonies would assimilate. They would not.

Many times, I saw rival ant colonies at war. The ants would lock heads with each other and pull back and forth. Eventually, the losing colony soldiers would be outnumbered, fighting one-to-three against the victors. There were dead ants all over the place. A littering of specks amid the grass.

Death and destruction, right there in my backyard. It was ridiculous and pointless and seemed, to me, a waste of time. Those ants had no idea how small  and insignificant they were.

Every time I read about the latest warring among our own species, I think of the ants and wonder, “How much wiser are we?”

If I worked for the Intergalactic Press, this would be my brief article:

Earthlings complete small mission

A rocket-powered shuttle carrying six humans landed safely on Earth yesterday, to the joy and relief of those in the species who weren’t too busy killing each other to pay attention.

Carbon-based humans are the most intelligent species to have evolved on Earth, a planet orbiting a non-descript, ordinary star in the hinterlands of the Milky Way galaxy.

“Intelligence is relative,” said Dr. Eelink Garbold, senior primitive-life studies professor at S2 University in the M51 galaxy. “Earthlings have limited exploration capabilities, but have made dramatic advances in recent decades. However, they peculiarly preserve a warring heritage, similar to other species found on the planet, such as ants.”

The shuttle spent 13 days off the planet while the humans on board performed what they call “experiments.”

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This is a question that I rarely ask myself, because I’ve been poking around and asking questions since I was a little kid. And so I know the answer to my original question: People respond, or don’t. You get what you want, or don’t. And life goes on.

Though I’ve made a career switch from journalism to stock analysis, you could say that the essential nature hasn’t changed: I’m a professional questions asker.

Is there a such thing as a stupid question? Yes. When your teacher told you otherwise, he lied.

This is me in front of a restaurant in Bournemouth, England. My married initials are ASK. (My professional and maiden initials are ASJ.)

Stupid questions usually result from not being well-read, not doing one’s homework or not paying attention to your subject. And then there’s the personal prying kind, or the passive aggressive kind — both of which signify that one is in the presence of an ill-mannered dolt. Other stupid questions are the ones where the asker is really trying to show off his or her knowledge, and the question itself is preceded by at least three declarative statements.

There are times when I know my question is about to be stupid. I know that it will totally give away that I haven’t read up on the subject completely. For the sake of time, I usually ask it anyway, with an apology.

Reporters learn an important lesson early on about questions: It’s better to reveal your stupidity to your interview subject than to confirm it for 200,000 people the next morning. (And in the Internet era, your stupidity is confirmed faster, followed by anonymous commenters who don’t let you forget it!)

For the intellectually curious, (which I know you are or why would you be reading my blog?) , questions make life more fun.

For fun, here is my short list of OK to ask questions and NOT OK to ask questions.* Please add your own favorites.

OK & FUN QUESTIONS:

“How old are you?” — If it’s relevant to your conversation, and you can not be obnoxious about it, why not ask this? Reporters are forced to ask it, and are often met with indignation. It’s ridiculous that in our society, age is treated as if it were some big secret. Every year, we each get older. My husband, who suffered from two bouts of cancer in his twenties, is proud of every year he gets. Count your blessings to have made it that far. I’m 28.

“It smells really badly like feet. Can you please make an announcement?” — I asked the flight attendant this prior to departure on my recent eight-hour flight to London. In my defense, the smell filled the cabin and was just awful. (She sympathized but was unable to comply. But how awesome would it have been if she had?!)

“Are you in love?” — I once asked a co-worker this after just having met her. She’d mentioned that she had a boyfriend and, at that time, I was puzzled about the nature of love. This co-worker later scolded me for that question, saying it was too prying. However, she’s now one of my best friends, so I suppose it all worked out.

“How much do you want?” — My alma maters have a real talent for hiring poor students to call my cell phone around 5:30 p.m. each spring and fall. After the student introduces herself and asks me whether I enjoyed my time at university, I usually interject with whether I’m willing to cut a check or not. That’s right Northwestern. I know your game.

“Is it that you really don’t know or that you aren’t allowed to tell me?” — I’m a huge fan of honesty in all situations, and I respect that some people’s employers prevent them from telling me certain things. So, I’d rather just know the nature of what I’m dealing with.

“Why do you want to know?” — This is a great response to prying questions. Sometimes, people don’t know what they shouldn’t have asked. Take pity, we’ve all been there.

NOT OK & BOORISH QUESTIONS:

“When is your baby due?” — Just do not.

“Is there a vegetarian option?” — Down South, I learned that it is never OK to ask this. (Unless I wanted to be immediately branded as a clueless northern urbanite, and who wants that?) This question particularly flopped in barbecue restaurants. Learned that the hard way.

“Who is ____ ?” — I’m a pop culture dunce, and the older I get, the more names I can put in this blank. Once, I was interviewing the manager of a riverboat casino in Northwest Indiana, and he proudly told me, “We’ve secured Mike Ditka as our spokesman.”  By saving grace and intuition, I knew that asking “Who is Mike Ditka?” would not ingratiate me to this man. As it was a phone interview, I quietly Googled the famous football player and coach and merely said aloud, “Congratulations!”

“When are you two going to get married?” — Are you asking, or accusing and trying to make a statement? I often hear this asked of couples who have been dating a long time. It’s a boorish question!

“What’s an IPO?” — My very first journalism internship out of undergraduate college was at the Washington Business Journal. To this day, I can’t believe that I asked that. Asking the owner of a private company that question is like asking any other person, “What’s cheese?” (Wikipedia link for IPO.)

*I’m sure there are laws about questions that hiring managers are allowed to ask. I’ve ignored those laws.

Now, I never altered a story to fit the lyrics and out more than 1,000 articles I wrote in my journalism career, it only happened about twice.  One was an article about cities that suffer from brain drain as youth flee to bigger cities in search of education, jobs, opportunities. In that one, I quoted, “Born to run.”

I also composed many of my articles while listening to Bruce. I’d put on my headphones and make sense of all of my data gathering while jamming away. The music helped me to focus and to feel lighter than I am, which enabled me to think faster and meet deadline.

Not only do I adore Springsteen’s music, I relate to it. Which creates a deeper connection than simple enjoyment. (My family hails from the same county in New Jersey that he does, and I have cousins who grew up in his hometown. But I think that his fans, no matter where they are from, universally share a connection to his music.)

Today, I wonder if my affinity for Springsteen’s music had an effect on how my articles shaped themselves. Did it influence me by making me write according to some theme of which I was not consciously aware? Would an analysis of my articles reveal a Springsteen bias?

New York Times columnist David Brooks, in an editorial that is half reflection-on-life and half ode-to-Springsteen, explores how Springsteen contributed to his non-formal education. He also remarks that our non-formal education contributes more to our happiness than what we learn in the classroom. I encourage you to check it out.