A few years ago, there was a local coffee shop / roaster / tea blender that offered nitro tea, and it was one of the best things I’ve ever had. Something about the nitrogen bubbles makes the taste sweeter and more complex. Unfortunately, Jeff Bezos (Whole Foods division) bought the entire operation for its roastery and closed the local shop (grrr).

 

So when I saw this nitro tea can in my local grocery store, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, nitro tea! Who doesn’t want nitro tea? On the other hand…London Fog. London Fog is usually an Earl Grey brewed with If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while, you know my personal tastes are offended by Earl Grey as both a concept and as a taste. Earl Grey only exists because people were trying to shill bad tea! It is the saddest tea flavor! (I don’t mind if other people like it, but alas.)

 

Of course, curiosity won out over prior experience and I bought the can.

 

For a tea that is an Earl Grey derivative, this is…not awful. I think if you liked Earl Grey, you would probably really like this. I found it to be only mildly offensive, which is definitely saying something. “Person who does not like Earl Grey continues to not like Earl Grey” is probably not the most profound thing I’ve ever written.

 

But I’m not mad I tried it. The nitro part of this didn't have as good a head of bubbles as the nitro tea from the store (probably an inevitable result of the canning process), but it does in fact give it a nice kiss of sweetness, and it almost makes up for the offensively chemical taste of extracted bergamot flavor, which was pretty mild because there was probably more oat milk than tea in it.

 

The thing I’ve learned from this is that nitro tea is a good thing—maybe, if I have executive function this summer, I’ll figure out how to make it myself.

There are many ways in which ADHD has been a massive, sometimes disabling, trial in my life. I failed out of college twice before I got it to stick. I sometimes completely forget about extremely important things. If I’m not deeply interested in the thing I’m doing, I feel like I have to physically drag my carcass across the finish line in an ignominious heap, which is not great for things that need to be done in order to be a competent adult.

 

On the other hand, one of the things this means is that I have a deep, inborn drive to capture my curiosity. I get minutely interested in things that other people might find arcane or boring. I am willing to try things I don’t like over and over, if I can give myself a reason to think of it as a challenge. I will spend twenty hours figuring out a way to do the thing that takes three seconds, simply because it's more fun to spend twenty hours, and also, I will forget to do it if it takes three boring seconds.

 

Much of the way my personality has formed—as a person who is endlessly curious and intensely challenge-motivated—is because I just can’t do things for normal reasons, and so I have to find workarounds.

 

All of this is a long-winded way to say: I am so deeply appreciative that so many of you took the time to engage with the questions I asked in the last newsletter, with comments, points, ideas, and just generally being kind and understanding, whether in the poll or as a reply to the newsletter (you can, by the way, just reply to the newsletter: I read all of them, even if I don't answer them, and I don't answer most of them because I am extremely, extremely terrible at replying). (Special shout out to the person who told me they'd been reading me since the days of my law school blog.)

 

I'm still figuring out exactly what I'm going to do and working toward setting other things up, but the general feeling I got was that the vast, vast majority of people are fine with anything within reason.

So far, knock on wood, 2024 has been productive (for me). Which is good. One of the things I feel like I continually have to discover is that I need to strike a balance between writing things that I feel like I am expected to write (which creates some weird things in my brain) and writing because I feel compelled to do it by a combination of delight, excitement, brain worms, or whatever it is that drives me. 

 

If I try to tell myself not to do the other things, I end up feeling like I don't get to be excited about writing. The trick is to give myself a number of hours for doing the expected things, and a smaller number of hours to let worms eat my brains, because apparently my brain is much happier being infested by worms.

 

Right now, I have two things I'm working on because of brain worms and one thing by way of “this is the thing I am expected to write.” You can probably guess what the “expected to write” project is (and I hope I'll be able to tell you about this in a couple of months).

 

One of my brain worm projects is something that I would characterize as “oh, Courtney, why are you writing that?” The heroine is a sock gremlin: that is, she is a magical being made of chaos who gets power from making socks turn into lint, and this is such a goofy thing to write about that if I actually think about it, it's…so goofy. If you look at the market today, you would just not really know why I would write that because you don't see a lot of people saying “you know, I could really go for a good sock gremlin” out in the market.

 

But spending a small amount of time working on this goofy brain worm project actually feels like it sharpens my writing everywhere else.

Today had a lot of bureaucratic stuff, and so I’m finishing this up late at night. Your evening bonus picture: my dog is not normally spotted, but the snow is coming fast and furious tonight, and here we are.

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.