La · Cour · des · Miracles

I often feel short of ways of making my current living space (I'm a college student, and it changes every freaking year) look decorated. I'm not allowed to paint. I don't have the money for a lot of things. So, this year, my roomie and I made the Tea Mural.

Just every time we drink a cup of tea where the bag came individually wrapped, we tape up the package in the color-appropriate spot.

(And yes, this is tea from two people. Not counting the eight or so kinds of loose leaf we also drink, or the non-individually wrapped Market Spice we finished in .2 seconds. Or the tea we drink out of the apartment.)

( pretty big pictures )

If you have any interesting tea artifacts, please post them!

Many Happy Returns
(for John Rettger)

Johnny, since to-day is
February the twelfth when
Neighbours and relations
   Think of you and wish,   
Though a staunch Aquarian,
Graciously accept the
Verbal celebrations
   Of a doubtful Fish.   

Seven years ago you
Warmed your mother's heart by
Making a successful
   Debut on our stage;    
Naivete's an act that
You already know you
Cannot get away with
   Even at your age.   

So I wish you first a
Sense of theatre; only
Those who love illusion
   And know it will go far:   
Otherwise we spend our
Lives in a confusion
Of what we say and do with
   Who we really are.   

( ... )

That is all that I can
Think of at this moment
And it's time I brought these
   Verses to a close:
Happy Birthday, Johnny,
Live beyond your income,
Travel for enjoyment,
   Follow your own nose.

February 1942

**

getting to read and post this poem in its entirety has made my day =D ...along with the conversation I got to have this afternoon with my professor at Smith, Floyd Cheung. first of all, he has a wonderful office. wonderfully cluttered. a whole wall of books. papers in purposefully hectic piles everywhere. desk of notes, lists, and students' essays to read. and he gave some very sane advice for how to handle the confusions of identity, race, academia, poetry, and romance. most encouragingly, he said something along the lines of: "i think that some things in life are really mysteries. and it's a great, amazingly fortunate thing for you to find someone you can think of a a 'significant other,' you know, to fall in love. and i think we're meant to cherish that." (maybe i am a fool for love. depending on you look at it, "love" may just be an intense infatuation, or a very big crush, in other words. love may be a mystery, but sometimes--as r.y.m. has compelled me to think more seriously about--one needs to find the concrete reasons.)

floyd and i talked a bit about how to talk with a loved one about race, immigration, etc. (in both 'academic' terms and in the words of more 'personal,' individual experience). it's a tricky process. ( ... )

**

advocate.com/Arts_and_Entertainment/Theater/Randy_Does_Andy/

rereading louise gluck probably has something to do with all of this, too. 2 more poems from A Village Life.

Harvest

It's autumn in the market--
not wise anymore to buy tomatoes.
They're beautiful still on the outside,
some perfectly round and red, the rare varieties
misshapen, individual, like human brains covered in red oilcloth--

Inside, they're gone. Black, moldy--
you can't take a bite without anxiety.
Here and there, among the tainted ones, a fruit
still perfect, picked before decay set in.

Instead of tomatoes, crops nobody really wants.
Pumpkins, a lot of pumpkins.
Gourds, ropes of dried chilies, braids of garlic.
The artisans weave dead flowers into wreaths;
they tie bits of colored yarn around dried lavender.
And people go on for a while buying these things
as though they thought the farmers would see to it
that things went back to normal:
the vines would go back to bearing new peas;
the first small lettuces, so fragile, so delicate, would begin
to poke out of the dirt.

Instead, it gets dark early.
And the rains get heavier; they carry
the weight of dead leaves.

At dusk, now, an atmosphere of threat, of foreboding.
And people feel this themselves; they give a name to the seasons,
harvest, to put a better face on these things.

The gourds are rotting on the ground, the sweet blue grapes are finished.
A few roots, maybe, but the gourd's so hard the farmers think
it isn't worth the effort to dig them out. For what?
To stand in the marketplace under a thin umbrella, in the rain, in the cold,
no customers anymore?

And then the frost comes; there's no more question of harvest.
The snow begins; the pretense of life ends.
The earth is white now; the fields shine when the moon rises.

I sit at the bedroom window, watching the snow fall.
The earth is like a mirror:
calm meeting calm, detachment meeting detachment.

What lives, lives underground.
What dies, dies without struggle.

( Solitude )

The problem with the internet is there are no primary sources, or even mentions of primary sources. It seems pretty certain that the story about the Kangxi Emperor is from some history called Ye Shi Da Guan, which I hope I can track down, and that probably has one of the origin stories in it, but that still leaves me not knowing where the other stories are from or what the earliest attestation to Bi Lo Chun's existence is.

I want, like, a college degree in tea, with a library to study in. Don't know how I'd find that. I'm hoping someone here knows more than I do, though? Any idea how old Bi Lo Chun is?

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

Current Location:	Jumping out of a perfectly good plane
Humeur actuelle:	dirty
Musique actuelle:	Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction

exceptindreams.livejournal.com/179412.html

Also, I'd be grateful if anyone has any suggestions of good sources/articles/websites that tie into the topic.

I thought of mentioning some sort of "spiritualish" or "pace of life" reason...personally, I like how brewing your own tea slows you down...whereas bottled tea fits into a fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle--grab it, shell out the money, drink it and run back to your busy life. Do you think it would be too far-fetched or subjective for me to write about this on my page?

Also...I'm curious...does anyone here actually drink and enjoy bottled tea? Every now and then I end up trying some and I'm usually disappointed in that it is soooooo sweet, but I found one company I can tolerate (and actually enjoy), which is Honest Tea. Overall though, I drink a lot of iced tea in the summer, but I almost always brew it myself...usually it's iced herbal tea from my own garden.