2017 Realistic Tea Goals

Everyone has a list of tea goals for the New Year, all with the best of intentions. Old Cwyn has no room to fail because the horde in the background waits to pounce and raid the stash. She fends off potential visitors regularly and the list of suitors grows longer by the month. Of course the son who will not leave home is looking for the opportunity to throw out mother’s tea. All these threats to my tea existence mean I too must set some goals for the year, even if just for show.

I will lose 20 lbs this year because I drink puerh.

People keep right on telling me that sheng puerh promotes weight loss, so it must be true. This year my efforts to drink puerh tea for my health will pay off big time and I will get right back into that Size 4 St. John suit I put on layaway the day I started my doctorate and paid off the day I deposited my dissertation. If not I can mail that suit to my shou-drinking sister and check this goal off either way and make the Dear Son happy in getting rid of something on my own.

I will spend at least $100 on tea from some lying, cheating, money-grubbing son of a gun.

Normally I spend more than that but this year I will surely spend less. Everyone says so in every list of tea goals, “I will spend less.” But then more topics spring up on Steepster or Reddit thanking the likes of Mei Leaf and Verdant with more photos of huge tea orders. How do we continue to order against all that learned logic we keep buying again and again with our student loan payments? Oh, but we have reasons. I remember how obnoxiously loud OxyClean mail order commercials were back in the day, but now you can buy this detergent booster in every grocery store in the US. Tacky and tasteless sell, and lies sell even better. Failing the tacky, we still have Facebook to thank for super premium collector sales that nobody with a credit card can resist, and everybody is already selling their WMD Mansa one year in.

Think you won’t fall prey to social marketing? We have an orange wig and a flag to show you.

Someone will find the 2000 year old tree and sell it by the kilo.

1800 never struck me as a nice stable number, we need to round up. Puerh needs to be at least as old as Jesus to sell in the west like pieces of the True Cross which are more than two miles long when all laid out in a line.

Yunnan Sourcing will have at least one 12% off sale.

I can check this goal off already.

I will mold at least one of my puerh experiments.

Ditto this goal. Done and gone. I learn more from mold than anything else. Menghai tea recovers well, by the way, and nasty old Xiaguan best of all. Keep your northerners dry, they don’t experiment well.

An as-yet-un-named Tea Entity will determine the correct spelling for puerh 普洱茶

Now, I’ve written this before probably but my friend Rob and I are still carrying on the same English argument ten years on. He lives in the UK, and I live in the US, and the chat goes something like this:

Him: Everything you do over there is wrong. You Yanks are butchering our language.

Me: No, we are cleaning it up. And I’m Polish Hungarian Jew. In no American universe will I ever be considered a Yank.

Him: It’s spelled flavour, not flavor. And you’re a Yank.

Me: We are clearing out all the extraneous vowels you cling to that nobody pronounces. The French vowels, and the Latin, and German, and the Welsh. The ones Microsoft Word corrects, which we invented.

Him: I drive my Ford on the correct side of the road, the same side horses rode for centuries.

Me: We invented Ford too, and nobody jousts anymore. They tweet.

Him: What you people play is not football.

Me: The people own the Packers, not some rich guy. We dumped your tea overboard for a reason. It was bad tea.

Him: Just let me know when you need more Yorkshire tea bags.

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I’m really wondering, is your Paedophile somehow less odious than my Pedophile? Because if someone says to me “So sorry about your diarrhoea” I am happy he cares even though nobody pronounces the “o” and there is no reason for that letter to be in the word whatsoever unless it suggests—well, never mind. The point is, nobody pronounces these extra letters and no one wants to remember how to spell them.

Which suggests that puer is better than puerh. But I really doubt the apostrophe in pu’er is gonna stick because it will not. No one will use it, neither will they use the dash for pu-er or pu-erh. In fact, I think Puer is a good way for English to distinguish the city in China from the beverage puerh. And as of now, despite babelcarp’s best efforts to promote the Chinese word bingwo, I bet my entire collection that beenghole will stick.

Why does everyone assume that different spellings of a word automatically mean taking offence? Or offense. English spelling has never been uniform, even Shakespeare himself spelled the same words differently and so did Ben Franklin. No one cared all through the Middle Ages nor the Renaissance to spell any word the same every time. Why should we start now? The English and American people have spelled the same words differently from one another for over two centuries and will go right on doing so. As long as they keep exporting Christmas and we keep exporting movies I’m sure we will all stay friends.

I will find one beengcha in my stash that I could not find last year.

Highly unlikely. But the other goals are achievable, so I can fail this one.

Happy New Year!