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The hours that I have been putting into school have meant that the original quantity of time that I put into previous activities has dwindled. Important things, like playing video games and watching TV and making fun of strangers in public situations [because, apparently, I’m an adolescent male] have been flung to the wayside like monkeys fling poo.

Okay, so I don’t really make fun of strangers.

OKAY, so I only do it on alternate Thursdays.

Among the other things that I don’t have time for anymore is normal social interaction on a regular basis. I’ve discovered, perhaps unsettlingly, that I have begun to compensate for this by talking to myself. [This might not be something that I should readily admit publicly, but I feel like if you all aren’t already judging me somewhat then you haven’t been paying attention and this might not faze you.]

So, I’m sitting here, reading my Calculus book like a good girl and I’m comprehending what’s going on. [This is a big deal.] Everything’s great, I’m jamming out to the dulcet tones of Yo-Yo Ma [because I can’t listen to music with words when I have to read something that requires real concentration], and then I turn the page and WHAT IN THE NAME OF SATAN’S UNDERWEAR IS THAT SUPPOSED TO BE? That isn’t math, that’s forgotten language of the people of Atlantis. The book is telling me that, “Now, we’re going to blah blah blah,” and I whine at it.

Out loud.

I whine to my book out loud. The words, “But I don’t WANNA,” may have actually been uttered, which is disturbing in and of itself because it was said in seriousness. This was compounded, however, by the fact that I said it to no one except the inanimate object sitting in front of me [that I have affectionately nicknamed Stalin Baby]. Half a second later I’m like, “Whoa,” and push my chair back.

There are only two things that I can do at this point. One is to go take a nap, but as I can’t be certain I’d actually wake up in time to get what I need to get done today I can’t do that. The other is to make me some Jasmine Pearl and subject you all to a long story about how my sanity is slipping away while I try to replace all of the oxygen in my body with the scent of this tea.

I guess this wasn’t so much about the tea as it was about me unloading on you all, but the tea is really good. Easily the best Jasmine I’ve had, ever. If I reach for it when I’m in this kind of state, that should be saying something.

All right. Woo-sah. I’m off to tackle Stalin Baby. Wish me luck.

This tea is good. Wait, let me rephrase that…this tea is DAMN FINE GOOD. I was excited when I got the oh-so-pretty package in the mail [A&D gets an A+ with a happy face sticker for their packaging scheme], but if I’m being honest part of me was afraid that this tea wasn’t going to live up to the hype I’d been frothing up in my brain.

That fear was not assuaged when I brewed a cup of Jackee Muntz and it smelled like the pages of an old book. [This may sound romantic, but those of you who have smelled this know that old book pages have a very distinctive smell you don’t necessarily want to associate with things you are about to ingest.]

Now, all of you likely know that the smell of the tea doesn’t necessarily have ANYTHING to do with how it tastes. Mercifully, this is the case for Sir Muntz, for he is smooth and absolutely delicious – like what I would imagine running into Nathan Fillion in a bar would be like.

I get a little burnt taste [not at all overwhelming, don’t be scurred] at first, but then the finish leaves you with a caramel taste in your mouth. It’s really quite amazing. I actually caught myself staring at the cup with my jaw hanging open for a few seconds after the first sip.

Let me put this all into perspective for you:

I am NOT a morning person. I wish I was, but I am most definitely not. If it weren’t for my actual will to live, people would have to pry me away from my duvet when the waking hour arrives.

Usually, I wake up with JUST enough time to get dressed, do the things I HAVE to do, and get where I need to be. Unless I HAVE to wake up, nothing and I mean NOTHING else seems more important than sleep when the alarm goes off.

Jackee Muntz is going to make me excited to get up tomorrow morning.

I might even find myself GETTING UP EARLY.

Hello, lover. I missed you while you were gone.

I can go from fatigued to bliss[fully fatigued] in 3 minutes and 30 seconds. And start waking up in about 5 more once the caffeine starts to work its juju. It’s a win-win situation, if you ask me.

I got a bunch of tea in from Samovar not too long ago, and a lot of it’s new. For those of you who read what I throw up here, you know that I like the words, so I’m going to be rolling out my thoughts on them slowly, even though I’ve tried…ehm…all of them already.

Before I say anything more, can I just say hats off to the Steepster monkeys who made all of this wonderfulness happen? Best update ever. Am I right?

Ok, so Wei Chi Cha. Or is it Wei Xi Cha? I’m not sure, but this tea is absolutely delightful. It’s like autumn in a cup. I’m always on the fence about whether to use ‘autumn’ or ‘fall’ because ‘autumn’ borders on snooty for me. I feel as though I should be wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. Fall seems much more casual comfortable, you know? It’s a little more hooded sweatshirt, which is how I roll. My quirky verbal prejudices aside, though, holy autumnal tea, Batman.

It smells like cider and cloves and cinnamon and dried leaves and log fires. I might be mistaken, but I think that this is a relatively new tea for Samovar, and when I read the description of it I had added it to my cart before I could realize that I’d clicked the button.

The taste of the tea is a little sour [I’ve been slowly discovering that just how sour is controlled greatly by the steep time – I recommend around 4 minutes, maybe 4 minutes 30, but play around with it.] The sourness dissipates once you’ve swallowed, though, and you get treated to this nice bit of sweetness that sinks into your tastebuds.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that the taste of this tea gets watered down quite quickly. If your cup is looking pinkish, you’re probably not going to get a ton of taste. You’re looking for something closer to a nice, light red hue. I haven’t had any luck beyond two cups, but there is a noticeable difference on the second steep.

All in all? A good tea. And it certainly is working well as a stand-in for me while I wait for the weather here to catch on to the fact that it’s officially fall. Right now it’s doing the best impression it can muster of a Louisiana swamp.

This was one of the first teas I got when I was getting into tea. That was…I don’t even know how many years ago. Since then I’ve bought this one a couple more times, but since I started drinking teas from other places like Adagio and Tea Forte and Samovar, I have become increasingly unimpressed with this one.

I got it because an employee at Teavana recommended it to me, and then she did that little wavy thing they do with the lid to waft the aroma into your face. Even to this day, I will tell you straight off that it smells like heaven.

It’s not that it tastes bad. It doesn’t. It just doesn’t…taste. At all. In a little experiment I let it sit for 6 minutes, and still? Nothing. Or at least not enough for me to enjoy the experience. I don’t feel like I should have to actively search my tea for flavor.

I hate to say it, but this is a big part of why it took me so long to really get into tea. I’d had some of the watered down stuff that they give you at restaurants from time to time, and the bagged stuff that isn’t exactly bursting with flavor, and then I decided to try some loose tea because I’d heard it was so much better. This one smelled a AMAZINGLY delicious, but the taste just didn’t live up to the hype [you know, in that it wasn’t present].

I figured that maybe all tea, even the “good stuff” just didn’t have much of a taste at all. Or that it was just too subtle for me to do anything other than smell it to appreciate it. [Obviously, this was before I tried Lapsang Souchong.] Now I know that this isn’t true, and so I can’t recommend this tea to anyone.

Since he said it better than I probably did in the above paragraphs, I leave you with a quote Uncle Iroh, one of my favorite characters from Avatar [yes, the cartoon – don’t judge, it’s phenomenal], “THIS IS NOTHING BUT HOT LEAF JUICE!”

Though, it may make for some nice potpourri.

For a while, I thought that oolongs weren’t [please pardon the pun] my cup of tea. I’d pretty much written them off in my mind as dirty spinach-y cousins of my tea repertoire who did unspeakable things with sheep and so no one talks about them.

I’m not sure why this is. It might be because the first steep of the oolongs I’ve tried tend to be pretty vegetal and I stopped paying attention after that. I probably also wasn’t steeping them in hot enough water or something equally silly, which speaks to how well I read directions sometimes.

Please, do not let what happened to me happened to you. Unless what happens to you is what ENDED up happening to me, because I drank this tea for an entire week.

An entire week. ALL WEEK LONG I DRANK THIS TEA. I woke up, started the day with a little Ryokucha or a matcha shake to prod my brain into waking up, and then I would drink this tea and do physics. Or drink this tea and do calculus. Or drink this tea and program. I would drink it in a box, and I would drink it with a fox. I would drink it in a house, and I would drink it with a mouse. I would drink it here and there and I WOULD DRINK IT EVERYWHERE. I drank this tea until I ran out of it yesterday, though tragically I just put an order through with Samovar so it’ll have to wait until next time.

In the same way that I was shocked when I tried Ryokucha for the first time, I was floored with how different this tea tasted from how I thought tea could ever taste. And my god, people, it EVOLVES [oh dear Zeus, I just had a flashback to my Pokemon playing days]. That isn’t just some shit they spin for the description to get you to buy the stuff. The taste shifts and matures and does all sorts of wonderful things between steeps so that you’re getting new flavors in every cup. And that little bit of magic is why this tea would last me for an entire afternoon, sometimes longer.

Before I get back to the taste, let me tell you first that I’ve heard/seen the phrase “mouth-feel” thrown around a few times as I get acclimated into the tea world, and I always snickered a bit. I mean, it’s water, right? I didn’t fully understand what they were referring to until I really gave this tea a chance. It DOES have texture. It’s…kind of silky, if that makes sense. It feels rich, almost luxurious. Perhaps you are accustomed to paying attention to this aspect of tea, but for someone who’s new to it…I guess you could say I’ve had a tea-piphany.

Samovar’s description of Four Seasons completely nails what is going on in this tea. I don’t always “get” the full array of what I could be experiencing when it comes to tea, but I was pleased to find myself able to pick out flavors from this one. The buttery component of it, especially, was something that surprised me. I bet this would taste sinfully good with a croissant.

In fact, and excuse me while I expose a little MORE geekiosity on you here, this tea is just about exactly what I thought butter beer would taste like.

Yes, I am referring to Harry Potter.

Inhale…

Good, good.

Exhale…

Inhale…

Meditate on the tea.

The tea is light.

The tea is love.

The tea is love, and you are going to buy more.

The tea is light, and you are getting your purse.

The tea is light, and the tea is love.

…

Ohmmmmm.

I’m out of Moorish Mint.

I’m out.

Of.

Moorish Mint.

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!

All right, Wallet. Methinks it’s time to get ready for a little workout. Have you been doing your exercises? Go wake up little miss Credit. Listen, don’t get me any lip. Shut your pie hole. I SAID, shut your PIE HOLE! It’s not my fault they put crack in this shizz.

In Virginia, we typically get a number of transition days between summer and fall where the weather doesn’t quite know what to do with itself. The day turns grey and the sun beats against the clouds to heat the residual moisture in the air and make the atmosphere hint at the humidity we sweated in during the previous months.

What results, when days like this occur, is a sense of overall gloom, where the sky feels like it is being lit from behind a dirty sheet of laminate. The temperature is cooling but not crisp like it gets when autumn is truly upon us. The best equivalent I can think of is when you get one of those hot microwaved towels that they offer at some Chinese restaurants. After the initial clean, fresh, and striking warmth evaporates, you’re left with a damp, limp, lukewarm piece of cloth that feels like an uncomfortable handshake. And then you get bitten by mosquitoes. Welcome to Virginia.

This kind of weather tends to make me grumpy, even though I know that it generally signifies that autumn is around the corner and if I can just hold out for a couple of weeks I will be invigorated into a frenzy that will drive my friends absolutely nuts. [Fall is my favorite season.] It also makes me sleepy and prone to have my thoughts wander. I believe it’s sometimes good to have those melancholy days where your mind can meander and you allow yourself to wallow in the sludge of personal gook that you’ve pushed away to simmer on the back-burner.

This becomes a problem, however, when I know that I have approximately 27 other things I need to be doing. So what should be a slow-moving, lethargic, draining-of-emotional-phlegm kind of day instead ends up being intensely stressful because I’m having a hell of a time getting anything done.

When I find myself in these kinds of situations, I need to step away, breathe, and allow myself to take a few minutes to do something distracting so I can clear my brain. You know, hit the personal “reset” button.

One of the best remedies I’ve discovered for this funk is to make some Masala Chai. It only takes fifteen to twenty minutes, which I can justify as being an excusable amount of time for a break, and once you remember how to make it it’s pretty mindless. The ritual is perfect because it requires attention, but not a lot of thinking – an excellent way to cleanse the mental palate.

My favorite thing about making Masala Chai, though, is the end result. This tea is something that wraps itself around all of your senses and gives you a gentle squeeze. Everything about it, from the aroma, to the creaminess, to the permeating warmth, to the quiet sense of accomplishment you get because hey, you just made yourself some goddamn Chai tea, is comforting.

Samovar’s Masala Chai has proven to be one of my absolute favorites, and I have a big tin that sits in the cabinet and waits patiently for days like these.

By the time I finish making my batch, 99 percent of the time, I find myself calmer, awakened, soothed, and ready to take on the world again. I’d say that for a tea to be able to accomplish that is a pretty big deal and certainly worth a try. And what harm can it do? At the very least, you will end up with something delicious. Plus, if the first cup doesn’t get you to where you need to be, there’s always cup two.