Tuesday, March 8, 2011

A Tea for International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. Celebrate, bearing in mind that we, as well as our sisters around the world are seeing our rights eroding or about to erode. Stand up and be counted! Noone is really free until we all are free.

I was trying to figure out how many seasons of the year we really have. Summer is pretty straightforward unless it is like the one when it was 42 the end of July. Then there's Fall, but Indian summer may or may not come in there. We're okay as we slide into winter until January (February this year) when there is the January thaw. Sometime the end of February, beginning of March we have "False Spring" which segues into "pot-hole road rage" season when you hope to make it to real spring with all your tires and both axles. There can be several of these. Finally it is Spring! But then there is Mud Season and every shoe and boot we own is caked with the stuff. It finally dries out and we think we can relax but wait, there is False summer - those 90 degree days in April that ensure you only have daffodils and other pretty flowers for one swiftly done day. Finally, after all that, is Summer. You count them, I'm tired.

To celebrate Women's Day and rising temperatures, I have having some Formosa Hsinchu Baihao Oolong, aka Oriental Beauty. This comes from Aura Teas. The dry leaves don't have a lot of scent, but as the first minute long infusion brews, a distinct lemon or lime rises from the pale old gold colored cup. This very refreshing tea tastes of a fresh green salad with citrus juice poured over it. Yum!

By the second infusion, the leaves were still only partially unfurled. They are huge and a pretty brown. The tea this time tasted more of fresh salad, but with only a little citrus. I could hardly wait for the third and I was very nicely rewarded. By now the liquor was a medium and very floral smelling, to me, it was like pansies, whose scent I love. The tea had a wonderful sweet, delicate floral taste and sadly, I had to stop, but it was wonderful while it lasted.

I am officially now a happy tea camper - my order for Black Currant Loose Leaf Tea has arrived from Tea Forte and very nice it is and they were good about packaging, even

1 comment:

Alex Zorach said...

I consider myself a feminist, sometimes even with radical feminist tendencies. What are some of the issues you're most concerned about in terms of erosion of women's rights?

While I think the more serious women's rights issues are mostly in developing countries, I do think that women's rights in the U.S. are not quite as far advanced as people, especially those with a more stereotypically conservative political persuasion, believe. I've heard a number of women express to me that they don't consider themselves feminists because they believe that women and men already have equal rights in the U.S. and they think that feminists are "just complaining" or are "wanting to be on higher footing than men".

But when you look at objective measures, such as representation in leadership positions within organizations, wage and salary pay for roughly similar jobs, and statistics of sexual assault, you get a different picture.

That's not to say there aren't issues facing men too. Men currently lag behind in terms of college educational achievement, and I do believe that our society is extremely repressive towards men expressing certain types of emotions, and even more repressive and often outright hostile towards deviation from gender or sexual norms. But as far as I'm concerned, being a feminist is equally committed to solving these problems as well.

=)