Different moods, different teas

Yesterday I really had to clean my room.  It's been a mess of clothes everywhere for weeks now, and I was finding it difficult to even get ready in the morning because I couldn't find any of my clothes underneath the mess of other clothes.
It was time to organize.  It was time to clean. all. the. things.

So I did.  It was pretty awesome to see my floor all sparkly again.  The sparkles might have just been my imagination, but to me, they were there.
And what did I drink while I did this?  Mint tea.  Mint tea is my concentration tea.  It's my get-the-fuck-to-work tea.  I think it's the smell.  It's focusing, somehow.  It doesn't wake me up, but if I'm already awake it helps me get to work.  Or at least, I think it does.  I don't know for sure if it's the tea, or if it's just my ritual of drinking mint tea before I get to work that helps me get into the right state of mind to do the work that needs to be done.

Anyway, this all got me thinking about why I drink tea.  A lot of the time, I drink it because I just like the taste of it, but sometimes it's for a different reason.  To relax, to wake myself up, to concentrate, or even occaisonally for spiritual reasons.  Sometimes my goal centres on drinking the tea itself, sometimes it's about what I hope to accomplish after drinking the tea.  So many reasons to drink tea besides just drinking tea. There's so much potential in each little cup.

Later at night I shared a pot of tea (Vanilla Black, World Tea House) with Mom.  She said she liked it, and I'm always happy when I find something like that that we both enjoy.  We sipped the tea while eating some nanaimo bars that she had picked up earlier.  It was super yum.  I suppose the real reason I made up that pot though, wasn't because I wanted to drink the tea, (although I did, and I managed to not steep it for too long this time, so it was really yummy) but because I also just wanted to share something with Mom.  And that's the beauty of any kind of food or drink, isn't it?  It's not just that we need to eat and drink to survive, and it's not just that we can like the taste of certain things, but it's also about who you do those things with.  It's about connecting with someone else for a moment.

All this thinking makes me want to throw a tea party sometime.

Finally, this morning I got myself a cup of chai (Tali's Masala Chai, World Tea House) on the way to work.  I really like it for the morning.  It's comforting in the morning, for some reason.  What's left in my cup now has been cold for a while, but I'm still sipping at it slowly.
I'll be going up to World Tea House later for lunch, so I'll update again later.