Hi! Hello! I wanted to write another blog post for this month, but it just wasn’t in the cards this time around. Ideally, I’d like to put out at least 2 posts a month, but at this point I can’t make promises, only hopes and aspirations. Anyhow, it snowed so much where I lived this February and shoveling was such a pain! We’re in the last few days (as I write this) of the month and now the temperature suddenly seems to want to tick up to the 40s (in Fahrenheit) which makes me nervous because I, in no way, remember it being this warm at this time of year while I was growing up. In happier news, I recently downloaded the libby app and signed up for the Queer Liberation Library (an online library anyone that lives in the USA can join) and the New York Public Library cards online (I don’t live in the city, but, apparently, if you live in New York state in general, you can get an NYPL online library card which is awesome). You might be wondering why I didn’t log into libby with my local library card…well… it’s because growing up, through my teenage years, and into my twenties I consistently lost or accidentally broke my library cards and at some point it just became too embarrassing for me to confess that I, yet again, somehow, broke my library card in half or just didn’t know where the heck it was. I am planning to eventually get another library card from my local library–just not today or anytime soon. Definitely some time before the end of the year I’ll get to it (maybe)! For now, though, I’m splitting my attention between using my NYPL library card to read Alfie and Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe by Carl Safina on libby, writing this blog post, and sipping on some earl grey tea.
Drinking earl grey always throws me back to my first encounter with earl grey. I got the idea to try it when I was around 8 years old on a recommendation from my childhood best friend (who is still one of my best friends to this day). I’ve known her since we were very literally in diapers (we were next door neighbors and, one day, when I was about 3 months old and she was just about a few days old, our mothers spotted each other holding their respective babies (us) in their arms) and I’ve always considered her the smartest person I’ve ever known–in fact, she’s currently working towards a PhD in physics which means I get to ask her all my unserious questions and get professional, research-backed answers (Like about time travel! …Which the answers for are way less exciting than science fiction. Apparently, it’s not at all possible to go back in time, but forward is possible…but only by a few seconds. As far as she knows, time travel research in physics is not really a thing and you’d get pretty weird looks if you went into academia saying you wanted to study it. RIP my Back to the Future dreams). Of course, when I was 8, I thought she was the smartest person in the world, so, when she sang the praises of earl grey tea with maple syrup as sweetener, I listened.
I begged my mother to buy me a box and she told me I might not like it but I wanted to try it anyway. I was certain I would like it. We went to the supermarket and she bought me a box of Bigelow’s earl grey (I know this because the box hasn’t changed very much since that time). I went to go make myself a mug the only way I knew how at 8 year old : with the microwave, the tea bag, and a mug full of water. I wouldn’t make tea this way now, but I didn’t grow up in a tea drinking family. The only tea we regularly had around was green tea bags bought in bulk from the asian market and I was certainly the only one who drank it every night. I had a ritual–before brushing my teeth and going to bed, I would put a green tea bag and water into what must have been a 12 oz mug and heated it up in the microwave until I deemed it sufficiently hot. I didn’t add sweetener or milk to it and drank it as it was because I thought that was the proper way to drink tea and coffee (I didn’t have coffee often. Just a sip here and there. Sometimes maybe even a couple ounces of black coffee in my own little mug. I was a hardcore 8 year old).
I took a sip of my first surely over-brewed, very hot mug of earl grey tea and was very disappointed. Bleh! I hated it! I thought to myself how that could possible be–I considered my friend and her family in general to be people of very good taste. Then I remembered the maple syrup and I added it to my mug. This only made it bleh but sweet. I decided that I was not an earl grey person and thus avoided it entirely and stuck to green tea only until I was in college and found myself wanting to explore the world of tea.
Now, I happily include earl grey as a regular member of my tea stash.
Onwards and Forwards, Always Yours,
Simon
P.S. The stuff I’ve been into this month!
Music:
Big Bad Dream by Ansuz
Circles by Vök
Movies:
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) by Laura Poitras (this documentary single handedly changed my mind about how I felt about Nan Goldin’s work and made me cry several times while watching it.)
Books:
Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić
My Body is Paper: Stories and Poems by Gil Cuadros (to be honest I’m still in the middle of reading this book, but it’s so good so I have to mention it!)
The Tea Sampler 