I always think that, being professionally bookish as well as being a spinster poet and what-not, I should be the kind of person who drinks interesting tea. So I go to the natural foods co-op and I buy all kinds of tea -- yoga-doing, karma-enhancing, aromatic tea. I make tea one evening, drink half a cup, and months later can't remember why I bought all those boxes of weird-ass tea in my cupboard and in the snackie drawer of my desk at work, and wonder how on earth it is that I've run out of diet Coke again.
My poems, however, drink interesting tea. They take long walks at all hours of the night. They probably do yoga and have dreams worth recounting. They live in rooms with delightful fragrances wafting through the air, and spend their evenings reading. They might be vegetarians. They certainly know more about wine than I do.
I'm not entirely sure I trust the things.
8 comments:
I do the exact same thing! I so badly want to like tea, and it totally seems like something any decent writerly hippie type must be fluent in, but it all tastes like dishwater to me.
" make tea one evening, drink half a cup, and months later can't remember why I bought all those boxes of weird-ass tea in my cupboard and in the snackie drawer of my desk at work, and wonder how on earth it is that I've run out of diet Coke again."
LOL! That cracks me up. I do that too (replace diet Coke with Talking Rain) I have just never heard it articulated so well!
Maybe there's a group of us "the tea people" who keep the vendors in the business w/our strange desire to hoard tea bags.
My poems drink scotch or coffee, have "love affairs", finish books, memorize other poems and read them well, know how to two-step, keep orderly notebooks, are "spartan" and sleep well. They often make more sense than I could've put into them.
Don't know about trust, but I'd be worried if they didn't aspire to greater things than my everyday. ;-)
I am a complete fusspot about my tea. I'm addicted to and devoted to decaf Ginger tea. It's hard to find--only one store in my area carries it, so when I go there I buy at least 6 boxes. It has a lovely kick to it though it looks almost colorless. It's a bit of an acquired taste so you will need to give it more than a half-cup try. It is also a wonderful digestive aid, long recommended by Chinese herbalists.
I feel about vegetarianism the way you feel about tea. Most of my friends are vegetarian, and I have the right personality fo it, and I see its many merits. I live with a vegetarian. But I am often found in front of a white refrigerator case, under a sign with a cow silhouette on it, buying a $3 steak I hope to tenderize into at least $5 worth of tenderness.
I'm writing a frontier novel at the moment so I guess my art and my carnivore tendencies fit together.
Two herbal teas that taste good and are good for you:
blueberry and lemon balm.
I drink a lot of tea in real life, but I'm pretty sure my poems don't. THey drink a lot of grapefruit juice and vodka. Also, they watch more television than I do, and can beat me at the coolest new video games.
And I have to join the chorus of people who do the SAME thing.
Although having Diet Coke (coke light) in France did dampen my tastes for a while--it does not taste good--so I drank a bunch of juice.
I did make it through a really long phase with drinking tea when Teavana opened in the hooty-tooty mall in town. That lasted about 3 months.
My poems ride the far hours of the night on flaming dragon wings, and drink lava and moonlight. They pass out before dawn, and wake up in the morning on the beach as the tide comes in.
Meanwhile, I get so tired out staying up an extra hour watching Conan O'Brien on T.V. that I'm pretty much finished for the week.
I've barely ever been able to make myself so much as taste the barest sip of tea, with one exception. I had some tea once at a Korean restaurant that was brewed from wheat and barley. I liked it quite a bit. Apart from that, however, I'm with the tea-tastes-like-dishwater contingent.
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