I have a confession to make.

I am a tea snob.

I love opening a tin of good, loose tea. I love lifting it up and breathing in the symphony of odours of every ingredient. I love scooping it up in a tea ball, hooking the tea ball onto my teapot, pouring the boiling water into the pot (but not over the ball – mustn’t “scare the tea”). I even love watching the stream of golden brown liquid splash into my cup, steam rising. And then, of course, there’s that first heavenly sip, where those airborne flavours marry on your tongue and produce something hinted at previously and yet oh-so-different.

I am also, alas, lazy.

So, teabags are my friends in the mornings, and usually during the day, too, when I’m working on the computer. I’m a Twinings fan, and Earl Grey used to be my standby until they introduced a new flavour a couple of years ago: Lady Grey, a similar tea but flavoured with orange and lemon as well as bergamot. I was so excited about it I gave it to countless people, who were probably just humouring me. I’ve been using Lady Grey teabags ever since, which I have to pick up downtown since my local grocery emporium doesn’t stock it.

Until last weekend, when my mother and I walked into a specialty grocery store to pick up various dinner items. I saw rows upon rows of Twinings tins – a whole world of loose teas! – and nestled in the midst of them all was a blue one that I had never seen anywhere else.

Twinings makes loose Lady Grey tea.

I picked it up; I cradled it to my chest; I crooned to it. It came back to Montreal with me. This morning, I said to myself that I would make a proper cup of tea for the first time in months, and opened the tin.

The first thing that struck me was the look of it. Tea is, well, brown, little crinkly brown dry things. Lady Grey has blue flowers in it, and whiteish chopped up peel.

It was beautiful. Now, I know I went to bed late last night, and got up too early this morning, but it was, well, pretty. The blue was a nice Wedgewood or Spode-type of blue, and the flowers sort of look like lavender flowers. The tea was a warmer brown than I remember from my tins of Earl Grey, too.

Then the smell reached me.

I never realise how old my tins of tea are until I buy a new one. Old tea has a bit of a musty, flat smell to it when you open the tin, but it still smells like tea. A new tin smells alive.

And the flavour is… complex. A pot of tea made with loose tea is like freshly ground coffee beans to instant coffee. Sure, it’s coffee, but to what degree?

Excellent tea such as this should be enjoyed in the very best cup you have. My mother gave me a single bone china cup and saucer a few years ago with pansies on them which I am petrified of breaking, so as much as I’d like to use it, I usually leave it on the shelf and admire it instead. When I’m finished this mug, though, methinks I shall fetch it down, wash it out, and go sit at my laptop to work on the Great Canadian Novel.

I

am

sickened.

This man will, Gods willing, suffer the worst backlash of karma I could wish the universe to boomerang at someone.

Oh, Sekhmet? Mighty lion-headed warrior goddess, born of the fire of Ra’s eyes to be a creature of vengeance; you who protect the good and annihilate the wicked… just step this way, please…

I have had the most marvellous birthday weekend.

My birthdays tend to be hit or miss. This year, I�ve discovered a solution: plan things all through the weekend so everyone gets a chance to see me at least once, and I get to do all sorts of stuff I find enjoyable. Why haven�t I thought of this before?

Friday night was spent dining on gazpacho and home-made oatmeal whole wheat bread with good friends. Saturday we had a handful of people over to read A Midsummer Night�s Dream, which, to my delight, was such a success that as soon as we ended, someone asked, �Can we do another one?�. Saturday I also saw three films I�d never seen before: Zeffirelli�s Romeo and Juliet (and Olivia was indeed divine!); Moulin Rouge (which was absolutely spectacular, but then I love the theatre, and this was a synthesis of theatrical spectacle and cutting-edge film); and The Matrix (yes, I worked at a science-fiction bookstore when it came out, and became so turned off by every customer coming in and raving about it that I didn�t see it in theatres, and was never really in the mood to watch it when we got it on DVD). Sunday I shopped, and with some birthday money acquired an elegantly stunning linen and brocade dress in black and purple for practically nothing, and a pair of leather arm bracers to serve as arm guards with my husband�s birthday present, a 35 # bow. And then, Monday night we did the cider and baked Brie thing at Hurley�s, where people gave me a group present: the music stand that was the subject of much comment here over a month ago: a fold-out music stand that can hold (as I discovered when I got home) five sheets of music. I�ll never have to turn pages again! Coming home, I found one last present had been left for me: a hardbound double volume set of the complete Sherlock Holmes stories, which I�d been seeking without much luck.

I haven�t had so much fun in ages! I should have a birthday every month!

Actually, I think I�m just relaxing enough to enjoy life again. It�s awfully nice not to be wound up, and to be able to sit back and appreciate friends, art, and literature again. I�m rediscovering how much I love art and culture, how hungrily I reach for intellectual exercise now that I have the room to do so. I�m rediscovering my analytical skills as well (I am shocked to see how much they have truly devalued, so I�m exercising them and bringing them back up to scratch!), mainly through rants on the state of culture here (you lucky readers, you), and, um, well, that book of alternative religion that MLG told me to write last summer over lunch one day. I deliberately didn�t sit down at the computer all weekend; I just wanted to live, instead of writing or thinking about living.

I�m also preparing to visit my parents for a week, taking the train up to Toronto tomorrow for a week of quiet and my mother�s home-cooked meals, so if I appear unreachable, that�s the reason why. Genteel teas; a visit to the ROM; lots of napping and reading and writing, with less distractions � bliss!

Degree: 1: A receipt for tuition, suitable for framing. 2: Some piece of paper that has absolutely no relevance to what one does after obtaining such. 3: Something one may not get if one fails math and/or has to take entirely too much math to obtain it.

This is from Kat’s list of alternate math definitions. Check them all out here. More math-related gems:

Absolut Value: The price of a bottle of vodka. The difference between this value and one’s disposable income determines how trashed one can get after the math exam.

Tangent: One of those weird hybrid citrus fruits, most likely.

It was a nice start to the day. I guess you just had to be there.

Gods, I love random blog links – through the Pepys project I just discovered a site called Wealth Bondage that touches on what I was trying to work out yesterday about art and capitalism, the role of the artist and philosopher in today’s increasingly inhospitable anti-intellectual society:

I think sometimes that we define altruism or philanthropy or charity too narrowly.We think that first you make money and then, if you are charitable, you give it away for a good cause. But, we all know that many people live lives of service, in which they voluntarily forego making much money: Saints, poets, teachers, artists, priests, activists, soldiers, firemen, stay at home Moms: All of these people are doing something other than profit-maximizing. Some have what used to be called a vocation or a calling, as opposed to a trade. They give of themselves, rather than accumulating what A. Bartlett Giamatti used to call “mucky pelf.”

We live in the world of economics, but […] we dwell in civil society. – from Nichomachean Ethics for Dummies

Whoa. Yeah, that. What he said.

I tripped across a blog called Veiled 4 Allah this morning, and the young woman, Al-Muhajabah, who keeps it has a wonderful set of articles and essays on being a Muslim woman in American society. Many of them revolve around the visible, physical recognition of a Muslim woman, mainly the wearing of the hijab, the full body covering, and the niquab, the face veil. She is intelligent, highly articulate, and has impressed me to no end by writing plainly and thoughtfully about her faith, rather than using it as a club like so many others do. This is a woman who has thought through her beliefs, and has made a personal choice rather than being a sheep.

Second, we can look a little at psychology. Sometimes the observance of outward things, like dress, seems trivial. Surely it’s more important to work on the inner things and on becoming a good person. Yet the outward things can often help us improve the inner things. There are several ways this is true. A woman may struggle with herself over the decision to wear hijab. It may be that she’s nervous about it, or that perhaps she likes to take pride in her attractiveness. Finding the courage to overcome fear is a positive character development, and subduing pride is a positive character development. Thus, the process of coming to wear hijab can be beneficial to a woman’s inner self. Also, when a woman wears hijab on a regular basis, she makes a decision each day to put it on before she goes out, and she sees it every time she looks at her reflection. She may often think, “Why do I bother with this?” And she may answer herself, “Because God commanded it, and I know that He watches what I do.” Or it may be that her awareness that her dress makes her a walking symbol of her religion reminds her not to do things that would bring her or her religion into disrepute. All of these are ways that the act of undertaking an outward observance can promote inner development. A woman may come to have a greater consciousness of God because she chooses to wear hijab for His sake, and this can only improve her character. – from On Veiling

If only everyone who wore a symbol which identified them as belonging to one religion or another considered each of their actions as reflecting upon their faith! We are all ambassadors for our faiths, cultures, educational institutions, families. So often in this society we are determined to be seen as individuals, and yet we judge by appearance and association, pigeonhole people into groups, and make generalisations. Until we learn to treat others as we wish to be treated, how can we have a society that respects the rich and varied tapestry of life this planet has to offer?

Insh’Allah, Al-Muhajabah will go on being a quiet inspiration to those who come across her site, portraying her faith as a thing of beauty.

Don’t think I’m anti-progress. That’s not what I’m advocating at all. I’m arguing for an educational system that values the past equally with the present and the future. Nostalgia certainly isn’t the way to go. It’s a dead-end, idealised, two-dimensional reality. Everything old is not necessarily good. However, everything new isn’t bad either. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater presents a problem eventually.

I was reading this article by Charles Leadbeater in the Financial Times on the (ab)uses of nostalgia by the media, advertising, the populace itself, and the state. I was agreeing with most of it and getting all excited until I realised at the end why it all seemed so familiar: I wrote a thesis like this. In fact, the very title Up the Down Escalator sounds so darned familiar I’d almost swear I read it as research, except it was just released.

Leadbeater’s previous book, though, is called Living on Thin Air, which examines how to balance a society skewed:

Individually and collectively we are all trading on ideas, creativity and judgement to make a living. Put it another way, this is the thin air business and these are the thin air commodities. The difference is that we’re now promoting a new type of brand: ourselves. “Knowledge,” states Charles Leadbeater in Living on Thin Air “is our most precious resource: we should organise society to maximise its creation and use. Our aim should be to harness the power of markets and community to the more fundamental goal of creating and spreading knowledge.” Big ideas, but for the truly knowledge-driven society, the prize, he says, is “radical and emancipatory.”

[…] Ultimately, Living on Thin Air is concerned with the task of channelling the tensions and energy between the major forces in society towards a new era of harmonious collaboration: “a society devoted to financial capitalism will be unbalanced and soulless. A society devoted to social solidarity will stagnate, lacking the dynamism of radical new ideas and the discipline of the competitive market. A society devoted totally to knowledge creation would be intelligent but poor. When these three forces of the new economy work together, they can be hugely dynamic,” he concludes. It makes a provocative manifesto. (Or so sayeth the Amazon.co.uk review.)

I’m now very curious to read what else he has to say, and how he says it.