Teabag INVention/ALTeration

A new semester starts on Tuesday, and I'm grateful for the long winter break - 4 weeks - because I think I've finally come down from the stress of fall semester, and I'm ready to start again. This past fall was the most difficult semester yet, and it leaves me apprehensive about the year and a half I have left. The workload was overwhelming and the schedule wrecked me, physically and emotionally; I finally hit rock-bottom, and I know that the pace and schedule I kept is not something I want to do again. (Zach would say I hit rock-bottom a few semesters before, when he got up in the morning and found me sleeping face-down on the floor with bits of bass wood stuck to my face, and an empty ice cream pint container in the trash can beside me. I know that was not my lowest point, because at least I fit in time to sleep!)

The good news is that I don't think it can get any worse than last semester, and I'm hoping that I can learn from the difficulties to navigate the remainder of my time at school with some balance (and even grace?). I'm very pleased with the skills I learned and the work that I produced, and I'm looking forward to sharing some of it once I process everything.

The reason for this post was not to share my MTV Real World confessional, but because I am excited about my new tea-drinking habit. I know I can't blame my blood clot at midterms on the constant stream of shitty front-desk coffee that fueled me last semester, but it was definitely a factor in my demise.

I'm really enjoying rediscovering some specialty loose tea that friends gave me a year ago for my birthday. I never quite knew how to brew it, since it was loose and I didn't have any of the loose tea paraphernalia. The other day I was reading through a book my mother-in-law gave us for Christmas, Real Simple's "869 new uses for old things," and the coffee filter re-use ideas inspired me to fold up some loose tea in a coffee filter and use a binder clip to hold it on the side of my mug. I'm not sure if I've seen this somewhere before and the book just jogged my memory, but I love the simplicity of materials and straightforwardness of the system. Many of the ideas in the book I won't or can't use, but I love reading through it as a collection of exercises in seeing everyday materials in a totally different way.

This would be the principal point in my design manifesto if I had one, whether I'd written it today or years ago when I started this blog (and ran my business).

It might not seem like much, but it was the little bit of basic, practical creativity that I've been yearning for lately. And getting to make the little teabags is a project that still captivates me, so I'm hoping that drinking tea becomes a healthy habit that helps me navigate through school a little more gracefully (or at least less jittery).