Does tea itself contribute stress?
The answer here is: surely, yes.
If so, then what’s the remedy?
Why, clearly, it’s a cup of tea.
Hard-liquor drinkers sometimes make that face; the one that isn’t just pleasure. Children must see this wincing face when watching, say, Westerns, and wonder why grown men would voluntarily drink something so painful-tasting, again and again.
Perhaps children intuit the social aspect of the deal; the difficult drink must be imbibed because the situation demands it.
Perhaps children recognise the celluloid sour mash as a necessary medicine. Children surely know the trade off between medium-term soothing and short-term yuckiness.
Anyway, that’s the tea I’ve been drinking in these busy weeks. These green tea leaves, from Shandong, were always destined to deliver astringency. But it’s the congestion of the leaves in the mug, the scalding I’ve been giving them; that’s what pulls the cheeks away from the teeth.
Gary Oldman in the film, “Leon”, makes a similar face each time his character pops a pill. His drug’s transformative comfort arrives reliably, but only after several compromising convulsions.
Let’s forget for a moment that caffeine probably only impacts 20 minutes after consumption; this is all about placebo, and the effect feels instant enough to me. The wincing is integral.
I feel grown up. I feel like a tough guy. This drink suits my tough little life.
Well, there must be some compensation for stress, right? There must be some pride that keeps a person grinding themselves into the ground week after week? I have written about the folly of wasting good tea when ill, and the same is surely true with stress. That’s one reason for persisting with this bad stuff through these crunch months. Why waste good tea when one cannot give it full concentration?
But it’s more than that, too. This bitter green tea means more than mere negation. It is the very bit between my teeth. It is the grit for the final furlong. The summer holiday is on the horizon; it’s still only on the horizon. Complacency cannot be contemplated.
Yes, many people would not be stressed by my current workload. Many people are much more stressed than I am, permanently. Maybe that number includes you.
But I am stressed. Really I am. I’m ready to listen to heavy metal. I’m ready to take another hit of the Shandong defibrillator drink.
There’s a bag of lovely sweet-pea Mao Feng [黄山毛峰] tea waiting in my freezer. There’s a Dancong oolong [单枞乌龙] I’ve been hunting down for years. The Elysian Fields beckon. But before that, there’s another tour of purgatory. That hit the spot.
Ok, so I’m enjoying the cliché.
I know that, come the summer, I’ll be hit by an ennui far worse than this so-called stress of mine. I’ll maybe even miss this puckering tea, this mouth-track to a tricky month.
And I do know that the tea-abuse is probably fuelling the blinkered mentality, not just reflecting it.
But you can’t deny me that, can you? I’m stressed, damn and blast it. Stressed.
