This is not the first tea named “Blood Moon” that I’ve reviewed; almost two years ago, I talked about “Blood Moon” from white2tea, which was a tea that was partially oxidized and not a white tea and not an oolong and not a black tea.

 

This is a different Blood Moon—it’s a Dar Jeeling from a small farm coop in India, and I would say that it’s a sturdy drinker. It’s got a full flavor that complements almost everything you can pair it with, and a robust caffeine hit that is just big enough that it’ll kickstart a dragging afternoon tea (and possibly, to my regret, keep you awake a little too long if you have it too late in the day).

 

This is the kind of tea that’s good for a tea break, but also the kind of tea you brew because you’re dehydrated and still have stuff to do and dammit, you just want something. It is a good tea.

You can get Blood Moon from Friday Afternoon Tea.

(Or, at least, you can sign up to be notified when it’s back in stock.)

For the next week, I’m trying to assuage my anxiety by doing things. My head has been manufacturing fun worst case scenarios involving election certification and the Supreme Court. I can’t tell myself polite fictions about the Court any longer, but here is what I think: the upcoming presidential election will be certified by the House on January 6th.

 

The House is currently red, but the House changes hands on January 3rd. 

 

The best way to avoid the worst case scenarios my brain insists on popping into my head at inopportune moments (perhaps it is not fair to blame the tea for not sleeping) is to turn the House blue.

 

In order to take back the House, we need to hold blue districts. So I’m going door to door to get out votes for Yadira Caraveo in hopes that she can hold that line. But I believe we can win bigger than polls suggest. On Monday and Tuesday afternoon, I’m going south to get out votes for Trisha Calvarese, who is running against carpet-bagging Lauren Boebert to replace Ken Buck.

 

We can do this.

The other day, I remembered something that I had not thought about in a long time. Just before eighth grade, I moved to a different school district. 

 

A lot of people who only know me online don’t realize that I can be shy in person, especially when meeting people for the first time, and especially especially when I was younger. I was not good at talking to people, and putting me in situations with people I didn’t know who all knew each other was not a recipe to make me talk more.

 

In my PE class, we would get dressed and go sit on a number that was assigned to us while the teacher would take attendance, and then we would stretch and warm up (again, on our number). We probably spent about 10 minutes of every class sitting on our numbers. There were four girls that were right next to each other. Me, a girl who I will call Rose, and two other girls who don’t need names.

 

Rose was a first generation Chinese immigrant; I was intensely shy and didn’t talk. The other two girls decided that we were both Chinese immigrants who didn’t speak a word of English, and so they would spend those ten minutes making fun of us and bad-mouthing immigration and Chinese people because they thought we didn’t understand what they were saying.

 

I could have disrupted this at any moment by saying “what on earth are you weirdos talking about? I was born in California.” But (a) shy, and (b) didn’t want to.

 

Lemme explain the “didn’t want to” part. This is going to sound weird, but they weren’t bothering me. I was bullied throughout grade school, and my grade school bullies knew to an art the things they could say about me that would make me feel badly.I was weird, I wore a lot of hand me downs, nobody liked me except the teachers, who liked me TOO much. Did I mention that I was so weird?

 

In comparison, this was such C-grade bullying. Someone asking me “why can’t you learn to speak English?” when I definitely spoke English didn’t hurt my feelings. The only thing that happened was that every day I looked at them and thought, “the longer I go without speaking, the stupider you will feel when you find out.”

 

Also, I didn’t want to speak because if I did, they would feel embarrassed. I didn’t care about their feelings. I did care that mean people who feel embarrassed get a lot meaner.

 

Neither Rose nor I said a single word during that class. The girls kept making awful, racist comments.

 

But near the end, there was a unit on basketball, and of course, we were assigned to teams by number, so it was me and Rose against those two girls and maybe some other girls.

 

I wasn’t good at shooting. I wasn’t good at dribbling. But Rose and I were both taller than those girls, and we used every inch of our arm span. It’s not like we coordinated verbally; Rose and I didn’t speak in that class, not once. We just guarded the hell out of those two girls. We blocked every shooting attempt. We caught their passes. We followed them around like angry, silent shadows and made sure they couldn’t do a single damned thing.

 

They got very, very angry—“stop following me!” one of them said, and “just let me shoot!” And “can’t you go bother someone else?”

 

Did we listen? No, of course not. At no point in the course of the semester did either of us EVER give any indication that we understood English, so how on earth could we understand what they were saying?

 

They complained to the teacher that we were scaring them and the teacher was so confused. “Wait, these girls on the other team aren’t touching you, they’re not calling names, they’re just…blocking your passes and saying nothing? That’s literally basketball.” So they got really angry and started crying. 

 

They literally bullied themselves into tears. Truly the least competent bullies in the world.

When I remembered this story at first, I was like “ha ha so funny story” and then I wrote it out and…woof. It’s a lot less funny in the telling than the experiencing.

 

But for some reason, I felt like in this exact week, I wanted you to know that sometimes really awful racists do end up just punching themselves in the face and catching consequences.

(For what it’s worth, Rose did speak English—she was in my AP English classes in high school and according to google, became a lawyer. Good for her.

 

We never did talk about this bizarre experience we had in PE together, though, and if I have one regret about the whole thing, it’s that I didn’t stand up for her.)

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