This is a limited time tea from white2tea—a wild yellow tea. Please note that I utterly forgot to take a picture, so this week, you get a primrose instead.

 

Yellow tea, if you don’t know, is a close cousin of green tea. This is an extreme oversimplification, but imagine that instead of making green tea, you allowed an extra oxidation step. This makes it like a very mellow green tea: sweet and with only a tiny hint of vegetal tang at the end, instead of green’s more robust variety.

 

I got this tea on a whim with the white2tea spring green tea sale, and it is extraordinary. It has the tiny leaves/bud of a new spring green, but the flavor and experience is so crisp and delightful.

 

I originally poured it out in my glass flask pitcher and then realized after the first sip that this was a mistake, and so I ran and got a mug to hold the excess. See, I use my glass pitcher for things that can steep a little longer: where I can sit and (for instance) write this newsletter and gradually finish and the tea won’t be much the worse for oversteeping.

 

I don’t actually know how this tea would handle a long steep, but the first taste of a ten second brew convinced me that I wanted to have more of it like this: delicate and fresh.

 

I’ve talked before about tea energy, and this tea has such a vibrant and delightful cha qi. I am sure, if we tried, we could break cha qi into a question of chemistry: a combination of caffeine and l-theanines and trace nutrients and chemicals. But this tea is playful like a puppy: there’s a delight to it, coupled with boundless energy, that made it a perfect start for my day.

Wild Huang was a limited time offer from white2tea which is, I’m sorry to tell you, no longer available this season.

I can tell my executive function is getting better because I am beginning to fix things that annoy me. 

 

In order to explain this, I am going to have to tell a story that stretches back to 2002 or 2003, but that I probably haven’t fully understood until the last handful of years.

 

At the time, I didn’t realize that I was neurodivergent. Heck, I don’t think I’d heard the term. I didn’t understand that I have audio processing issues and that music actually is really important for masking noises that otherwise distract and annoy me and also because the right music does amazing things to my brain. 

 

I like all kinds of music, but music that I work to? That has to be a special beast. There can’t be words—words distract me. There has to be flow. There has to be repetition in musical phrase but surprise in composition. I have to know the music so well that I anticipate where it will be going; I cannot work to music that I have never heard before. The music has to tell a story, but cannot be distracting while it does so.

 

In any event, at some point in 2003, I found work by a Belgian artist called Ehma that seemed to magically meet the needs of the hungriest parts of my brain.  I am not good at describing music, so forgive me if I don’t do it well. My favorite album was called La plage de Blâne-est. If you listen to it (and I have links at the end), you’ll see what I mean by all the above. I listened to Ehma on essentially continuous repeat throughout law school: the music just did something to my brain.

 

In any event, sometime in the middle of doing Fancy Law Stuff post-graduation, I was stupidly busy, had about eight hours a day to myself (this included the time I was supposed to sleep) and my laptop died, and I didn’t have time to get a new laptop and recompile my Linux kernel (a whole other story; I tried to make it this story but this story is too long as is). I promise this is relevant.

 

That started a second period in my life: I got an Apple laptop because at least that has a bash command line (I still use bash to this day!) and after that, I was stunningly busy for many, many years and just didn’t have time to get things set up again and so I didn’t. “I didn’t have time” morphed into my using the original iTunes (which was great) and that morphed into my using Apple Music (which was less great) and that morphed into iTunes disappearing into Apple Music.

 

A thing happened when Apple shifted to Apple Music: Apple Music stopped recognizing, and would not play, my carefully hoarded MP3s from Ehma, which made absolutely no sense to me. Why wouldn’t it work? The MP3s were fine! I saved them, of course, and would occasionally boot up another music system so I could listen to them, but the fun thing about ADHD is that if you can’t see something, it doesn’t exist, and so eventually I forgot it existed.

 

From 2018 until last week, I had not played Ehma. (I now see that Ehma has since uploaded a few pieces to Apple Music, but yay ADHD brain, I was so firmly convinced that it didn’t exist on Apple Music that I stopped checking).

 

Here’s what snapped me out of it: Apple Music has gotten worse and worse. The official term for this, from Cory Doctorow, is “enshittification,” and it is what corporations do when they think they can get away from it.

 

Apple Music went from working seamlessly with my speaker system to needing to be reauthorized every month (annoying) to needing to be reauthorized what felt like every day. And you can’t reauthorize it from a desktop, so I would sit down to work in my office and not have my phone (because distractions bad) and then wouldn’t be able to play music because you need to authorize from a phone, so then I couldn’t play music while I was working and my brain just doesn’t handle focus in an un-musicked state. I do not think I realized how much this was impacting me.

 

Last Monday, I realized that I was only paying for this stupid so-called service because I haven’t thought about it. It doesn’t make financial sense because my brain is cranky about new music. It likes listening to the same thing on continuous repeat about ninety seven thousand times and I wish that was an exaggeration. So why am I giving over a hundred bucks a year to Apple Music when I could just figure out how to give that exact amount of money to the artist whose music I will spend five months listening to?

 

So I set up a network storage drive and we moved all our purchased music to the network storage drive and my brain suddenly remembered, oh, yeah. Ehma! That exists!

 

I played it for the first time in years and it was like a calming, weighted blanket for my brain. I could just feel myself getting soft and cozy and beginning to focus. Things started clicking in my brain. I sat and listened to music that felt like the finest GABA oolong. I cried for no reason I could discern. Then I had an amazing writing session and after a long time, I surfaced and was like “you know, I wonder if there is more Ehma? Because it’s been nearly 20 years.”

 

There was more Ehma. I downloaded everything there was and sent the artist about what I would pay for half a year of Apple Music and as much of a rambling thank you as would fit in the message space.

 

I have, I think, listened to La plage de Blâne-est a dozen times since then. Because here’s the flip side of ADHD: yes, I forgot things if they’re not right in front of me. But once they are, it’s like they were never gone.

 

Anyway, here are links to Ehma. This music is magic for my brain.

 

On Jamendo: La plage de Blâne-est and just about everything?

On Altermusique: The early albums

On Bandcamp: The later albums.

On Apple Music: Quelques fragments d’histoires anciennes

On Spotify: Quelques fragments d’histories anciennes

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