i Pet my Xiaguans in Bed

I have reached a new level of Low, and yes I'm going to tell you about it. Using one's blog for confessional purposes is indeed pithy and tacky, but I know for a fact that tea drunks have few other places to go. Everywhere else we must be serious and attend studiously to the noble features of an aged tea cake. You see, Old Cwyn understands the Dirty Side of tea, the activities nobody talks about. Like why sleeping in sweatpants is a good idea to keep out the scratchy tea crumbs. And how dribbling tea inside your shirt is inevitable and the best solution is buying new tea ware rather than taking the trouble to wash everything.

Turns out the bed is also the best place to sniff and pet my tea cakes. Keep in mind that a pile of beeng cha is not the only thing I'm rolling over. Normally I keep a tea tray full of various objects on the other side of the bed. Right now the tea tray I'm using is a Chantal in Pumpkin. On this tray I currently have: various lip balms, a cartridge fountain pen, various vitamin bottles, two cells phones, a weekly pill box, cotton, a USB cable, Fishermen's Friend mints, a box of wooden kitchen matches (don't ask), a jar of Albolene, rechargeable batteries, a Converse watch, an e-cigarette, and a small camel hair brush. The brush is the important thing because I use it to brush mold off my Tuos over the small wastepaper basket next to the bed. Currently I am brushing a 2013 Xiaguan Ji Si (gold ribbon tuo) that I'm aging in this tin cup along with some other no-name tiny beeng. My little aging process browned the tea, and started lifting apart the tuo causing her ribbon to fall out.

Tuo tin. Dunno what it says. Rather like the drawing, he's hot.

This evening I've been trying to research the year on this Xiaguan cake somebody sent me. Naturally the cake needs to be on the bed for this reason. So far I've found it on Ebay selling under the name of "Excellent Xiaguan" but with no year on it. Maybe it's a fake. Still, I want to drink it now after all this online research work. The wrapper has some bug bites. I'm hopeful those bites pre-date my mattress, but can't be bothered to verify. The Xiaguan has left a good pile of crumbs on the sheets which I pick up using a white handkerchief and shake into the can next to the bed.

I can't guess what this is. Red Crane fake something maybe.

All right, that's disgusting. YES YuCK. Nobody with a partner in the bed gets away with such behavior. Fortunately I don't have a partner to consider, although some sanity might creep into my tea habit if I did. Perhaps I could learn to leave my tuos in the crock where they belong instead of splayed all over the duvet. But I don't understand the need to sleep with anyone else. How do people go from sleeping alone as a child to all of a sudden needing an adult companion in bed? Maybe I don't want to know the answer to that. Even my cats aren't allowed to sleep on the bed. When you allow people or cats to sleep on your bed, they begin to assume control. They think we are in some sort of large snoring litter where we all lick each other and assume an entitlement to make demands. That's worse than a few crumbs of tea.

I'm sheepish enough, however, to know the nuns would be appalled at my behavior. Especially Sister Grace Clare who conducted impromptu inspections of our rooms and caught my bed unmade a few times. But she is dead now, and that limits the impact of her criticism to a mental chorus consisting of  other mostly dead nuns. The truth is I may not be far behind them on the road to the misty afterlife. However, I plan to out-live them all which means only a couple more years while blissfully brushing my beengs to the very end, because of another truth that I treasure far more:

When one has a tea habit, one has an excuse to ignore other hobbies normal people my age are supposed to have. For instance, I can sniff in superiority to the ladies who gym. Who has time for all the fuss of institutional exercise facilities when I'm busy at home rotating my beengs for optimal humidity distribution and air flow? I can ix-nay on the book club because my intelligence finds work cataloguing and translating characters while reading between the bug bites. I don't require the latest romance novel when I can nap and dream of Taiwan businessmen driving a Lexus with Lao Cha Tou bricks in their pants. And who needs to waste time wandering a farmer's market when I can already guess what they are selling, and instead check out what's new on Yunnan Sourcing, tasty things I've never, ever seen before? You see, tea is a serious hobby, far more engaging than getting together for an Avon party. Patting my cheeks with puerh works just as well as any of those trendy facial mists. In fact, I've been considering forgoing deodorant altogether and just slapping some wet tea where it counts if I simply must bother to go out. One of my friends said she might buy me a green tea deodorant, I just laughed, silly thing. Tea certainly confers innumerable exemptions and simplifies my life from activities other people take so seriously.

See? I've written an entire post already and didn't get around to discussing the Xiaguans, which is really what I intended to do here. Anyone can see I'm far too busy to interact with people out in the real world, what with all this tea around me, and plenty of tea drunks online to chat with. And then I have Dear Son nagging about supporting me on his part-time convenience store job, and I get distracted needing to tell him for the umpteenth time why taking a second job is really the best solution for him. Now, I must get all this tea off the bed for my nap. I will put Xiaguan on my calendar to discuss another day.

Requiescat in Pace.