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Wave of Regret?

Inspired by new Steepster member tea-and-music, I’ve been brewing bowl tea the past several days with my two larger bowl-shaped teacups. It’s a method I’ve played with intermittently over the past few years, though I never fully appreciated it and have never logged any tasting notes this way.

In a past life, I was a research scientist in a very small lab in which I had almost sole control and authority over my work. I had to do everything from the ground up, from the dirty work of set-up and breakdown and tending to creatures, to designing research methodologies, sourcing materials, designing and building prototypes, product formulation, data collection and analysis, writing, working with the big and scary multi-national partner companies to test iterations of their products. What I wrote sounds like a resumé (and maybe it is, maybe I’m pumping myself up to set foot in the tea business), but it’s really a reflection of how my education, training and one of my past lives have influenced my current approach to tea.

I left that line of work for two reasons: one was that I was naive (still am!) and moved to the city without a car, nor the money to buy one and pay for parking. I had to ride my bicycle to the lab via various modes of public transportation. What normally would have been an hour+ commute one way took 2.5 to 3 hours. I was miserable because I had no life and was broke because working for a small lab paid chicken scratch in the most expensive city on the west coast. The second reason I left the lab: science is tedious. I went back to school to pursue a degree in engineering because I realized I enjoyed the design process more than the necessary detailed work. I felt like the line of science I was in didn’t really allow for discovery so much as pumping out effective products and fighting a literal evolutionary arms race. Cue more life happenings, and I’ve ended up in retail (again)(at least I’ve managed to weasel my way into a set schedule)(and I may be without a livelihood soon if I don’t quell my inner uppity woman).

What this probably unnecessary glimpse into my life comes down to is how I’ve approached tea drinking since I’ve been on Steepster. If I weren’t so self-absorbed and verbose in writing, I’d probably just say… I wouldn’t say anything. No preamble to drinking this tea (this tasting note was originally meant for White2Tea’s 2013 Shoumei, but I realized by the end of my keyboard tippy-tapping that this note was a bit too long and mostly unrelated to deposit there). But here I am and here you are and if you haven’t given up by now (this site doesn’t really possess the architecture to be a blog nor does it attract people looking for such)(but like science, I find following multiple blogs scattered about the internet a tedious task, not to mention the accumulation of comments, meaningful or otherwise, is glacial), well I’m sorry because conclusions have never been a forte. So how do I get to the meat of this drivel?

….By breaking up my thoughts with a two-word statement and line spacing.

Bowl tea.

My approach to brewing and drinking tea is methodical and detailed, though it may not come across that way in my tasting notes. I like to impress the persona of subdued quirkiness to keep things interesting and light-hearted because I am waaay too serious in day-to-day function. Other sipping sessions and tasting notes are truly off-the-wall and posted at the behest of my hormone fluctuations. I know my controlling, detail-oriented self bleeds into the majority of my tasting notes and even into some of my sillier loggings. I can’t help but include the minutae of leaf amount and water temperature and vessel size and steeping time because well, I keep track of this stuff whether I want to or not. Reproducibility and manipulation of variables — it’s ingrained. Thank youuuu, science! And besides, the little sliders and toggle buttons offer a tiny bit of interface interaction when my easily sidetracked mind can’t figure out what to type.

So this recent foray into bowl tea finds me still weighing out the tea and logging the temperatures because variable temperature kettles are the perfectionist’s dream (use of calibrated thermometers are the control freak’s dream). Sometimes I wish I never knew the volume of my teapots and gaiwans and teacups, not to mention using Ball jars with volume delineations for much of my Western brewing, because constantly relying on such detailed knowledge takes away from the essence of tea.

Bowl tea.

I feel like tea-and-music stepping into our show is a catalyst for my own transformation. I don’t know if tea-and-music will stick around, like so very many others, but thanks for making an appearance regardless. I like what the past four sessions, spurred by their presence, have done for me in terms of mindfulness. May future sessions in this manner be weighed by the feel of the leaf in my hand and the water deemed hot enough by the rushing, metallic sounds produced by my long-forgotten shittily-gauged steel stovetop kettle (an “It’s about time you got your ass out to California” gift provided to me 10 years ago when I moved out here by the old woman I somehow, someway ended up living with. funny.) May future sessions in this manner help me absolve myself of the desire to control all the things, to once again find wonder and amazement in the discovery process, and right now to firm the integrity needed to, in the midst of a pandemic, continue confronting the decisions, or lack thereof, of the provider of my livelihood… and ultimately to live the notion of uncertainty. Did I mention I’m naive?

Bowl tea.

The times, they are a’changin’.