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A completely pointless post about tea, the British Empire, and whether or not my eyes are closed

A completely pointless post about tea, the British Empire, and whether or not my eyes are closed

Last updated on: September 10, 2015 at 2:43 pm by Rebecca Frech

A completely pointless post about tea, the British Empire, and whether or not my eyes are closed 2015-09-10T14:43:45-05:00 Rebecca Frech

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I’m really tired, so I let my ADD brain out to play today. If you’ve ever wondered what’s going on in my head, this is pretty much what it sounds like all the time.

This isn’t the post I wanted to write today, or for the last week really, but what I want to say isn’t coming out. It’s stuck somewhere in my head because I’m too blasted tired to go find it. Last week, my body decided that it no longer needs to sleep. I was sleeping just fine for the whole of my life…and then the not-conscious decision making part decided that we were just over sleep…so we’re not doing that any more.

Some nights, I fall asleep just fine only to wake up half an hour later. I try to tell myself “Self, you’re being dumb and are not really rested. Go back to sleep!” But myself doesn’t listen. (My husband and parents aren’t surprised by the not listening part…which is weird…) I lay there and think about what we’re going to do for Thanksgiving, where I’m going to take my college roommate when she comes to visit in three weeks, or what color to paint the master bathroom in the house we’re going to paint someday. Other nights, I make it all the way until 4-ish, and I’m pretty sure I could go back to sleep except for my husband waking up at 4:45 and making bacon and eggs for breakfast. Can anyone really go to sleep when the house smells like bacon?

The worst are the nights where I almost fall asleep and then lay there in bed in a weird twilight-y between stage where my body is totally relaxed and I lay there wondering if my eyes are really closed because I closed them but it doesn’t fell like there’s anything on my eyeballs. While I do eventually drift off, it’s not for hours and those are the nights when I have weird dreams. Those are the mornings when I wake up exhausted and am grateful for the man who grows the tea that’s in my cup at 6am.

I don’t think the Tea Man gets enough credit around here. The Coffee Man is everyone’s hero. We even know his name, Juan Valdez, and that he has a cute donkey. They both live somewhere in the Columbian mountains where the coffee beans grow.

But the Tea Man….

Tiny little tea leaves…

He’s my hero these days – picking those leaves at the perfect point and then drying them…or whatever magic voo-doo makes those leaves ready for my tea. You know who’s the real hero? The man who decided to take those leaves and put them in hot water to begin with. Why don’t we know that guy’s name? Seems like he’s pretty instrumental to human history. The whole British Empire was built on tea. Without it, what would the Brits have cared about India? They hung around and fought for it because that’s where the tea grows, and where would the English be without tea? They’d be drinking ale or coffee or something, but they definitely wouldn’t be British. Would they?

So if anyone should know the Tea Man’s name, it should be people in England. They could name a street after him. As long as it wasn’t long and hard to pronounce. Those are the worst street names because they just confuse the tourists, and then what do you get except a bunch of lost people wandering around. Which could be good for the taxi drivers, couldn’t it? The taxi men should hope for confusing street names. They’d make out like bandits.

I suppose the taxi women would too, but we don’t really hear about women cabbies, do we? I’m sure they’re there…plus I meant “men” in the universal “human being” kind of way. Do people still do that? Say Man or Men and mean People? Like the Species of Man…that’s a thing. I know it from Christmas Carols and the non-politically corrected readings at Mass. When did we start Politically Correcting the things at Church anyway? I like my Gospels controversial. It wakes people up and makes them pay attention!

Like tea does. And coffee if you like it. I only like it with enough cream and sugar to no longer taste like coffee, which is coffee-flavored hot chocolate really. And don’t even get me started on the origins of hot chocolate – Montezuma and ball games where you got killed if you fouled someone and folks wore big feathered headdresses. It was a hot mess down there. Which makes you wonder why they didn’t drink their cocoa cold. Mexico is hot, y’all. I was there a lot of times…back in the day…

Whoo! We would go across the border and…well, that’s probably a story for another day.

So what do you think? Are my eyelids really closed, and why can’t I feel them? It’s weird, y’all. Freaky deaky weird.

Photos:

Tea Cup By Miya (Miya’s file) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5) or CC BY-SA 2.1 jp (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.1/jp/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Tea Leaves By Sebastianjude [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

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