or, maybe it’s just liver season
Sunday 7 February 2010 | I like a cookie
I mean, it is liver season. And I’ve been drinking this detox tea for springtime, and maybe that’s what’s making me want to rip phone books in half (as Herself used to say of, well, herself, when around mid-sesshin she started feeling the joriki—or maybe I used to say it—I do recollect her admitting, “I feel like I could put my arms around a huge tree and just pull it up! By the roots!” But maybe that was me too. I’m old, I can’t remember jack shit anymore).
Anyway, since I’m mentioning this tea which is maybe helping make me into worse of an asshole than I already am, let me at least show you the insanely pretty thing out of which I’m drinking it. Pictures fail to represent it, though.
This vessel was a decadent splurge on my part—I fought it for days, because of corporate evil Stbx plus made-in-China plus everything else, but dude, in the end how could I not, because OMG RARE PURPLE CLAY. Also it’s called “Gobelet Magique,” for chrissakes people what do you want from me.
Anyway I caved and bought it and it does keep my tea warm and it keeps me off the streets. That is, I suspect that in difficult moments, contemplating its beauty meditatively in the classroom keeps me from being unnecessarily viciously sarcastic with my more racist/sexist students (also I put the Third Step Prayer on a little card where I can see it and I take deep fucking breaths and grin a lot, unnaturally, disingenuously, like Tony Blair). Remind me sometime to tell you about the final project which one student submitted last semester, to which project my officemates and I now refer as “Big Bag O’ Racism,” and which we show to current students as an example of How to Not Get an A from Us. Hint: it has a feathered Plains Native “headdress” in it, made of dyed chicken feathers and construction paper. And the student who made it is Persian.
She’s lucky I was in the hospital and the department got someone else to grade my papers, otherwise I would have failed her overachieving Asian-American pre-med ass. As it was I think she got a B-minus. She’s a good kid; I just clearly didn’t teach her anything. Do they make a tea for that?
