Oolong was the first tea I had that I really enjoyed. I know that may sound weird, but I didn’t start having tea until I was in my twenties, and the first teas I had were pretty blah—Liptons in a restaurant, with no idea what the possibility of tea was, and the notion that I had never had tea before (my parents had religious objections to tea) and I, having newly shed the religious label, wanted to see what the fuss was about.
My first thought was that tea was overblown and overrated. Herbal teas were great, yes, but actual tea? It was fine in some circumstances, but that was all it was. Fine.
So I can distinctly remember the first time I had tea that I loved. I had just moved to the Bay Area for grad school, and one of my roommates was Chinese. She took us to Chinatown and went to a tea shop, and for the first time in my life, I walked into a Chinese tea shop.
The walls were lined with metal canisters. The entire shop smelled like tea, and if you asked, they’d pull up a sample and let you smell it. It was my first experience with anything like it, and my first realization that Lipton’s is like tea in the sense that Oreo’s are like cookies: yes, they are cookies; yes, sometimes they’re what you crave, but the class of items that belongs to “tea” is so much broader and so much better than the one item represents.
It was love at first scent for me. I bought a teapot (which I still have) and a vacuum-sealed bag of oolong, and I discovered that I loved tea.
This tea reminds me very much of that first tea that I loved: it’s delicate and floral, made with large leaves that unfold into sweet-scented perfection. The taste is clear and round, and it fills me with so much nostalgia for a discovery that quietly altered my life.
I’ve been immersed in politics for, um, several weeks. Part of it is hope that finally, endlessly, we will be able to put some of the awfulness of the last years behind us and move forward into a world where we care about an equitable future.
But also, confession time: JD Vance speaks directly to a very specific grudge that I’m holding.
You want to know my grudge? I am endlessly grudging against what I call in my head the “legal abuser network”—that set of people who think that power is more important than, you know, treating folks with dignity. They’ve aligned themselves with abusers over and over and gaslit everyone who remains. JD Vance is On My List. In other circumstances, “stop being such assholes and treat people well!” would be a moral statement and not a grudge. But they tried to induct me into the “no, look, you’ll get power, it’s cool, just pretend the abuse didn’t happen” club, and so it’s absolutely a grudge and I want them all to fail.
But I digress.
I have been taking a very grim pleasure in watching people flip over rocks and seeing—yet again—that there is JD Vance, writhing away from the light like a many-legged centipede, leaving a trail behind him filled with things like his rancor for childless cat ladies and his belief that the Italians and the Irish were violent immigrants who maybe should have been banned from entering the country in the 1840s, and his statement that the only purpose that a postmenopausal female (it’s always females! Jerks like JD Vance can never use the word “women!”) serves is to do childcare.
Last night, I was thinking about how Vice President Harris has reinvigorated a campaign that many (but not me) thought dead. I was watching Michelle Obama deliver a speech as probably one of the best orators in the nation, possibly beating out her husband who is a generational talent at giving speeches. And I thought about how many women in their generation—a scant decade older than me—faced barriers to entry from so many sides, and how much of who they have become was shaped by opposition.
And it made me doubly proud to be the party of Not JD Vance, because as we can all plainly see, the purpose of a postmenopausal female is to kick ass.
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