Write about Tea by Paige B. '24

I started writing blogposts when I came to MIT. I wanted to be like a CJ historian but for the history of myself throughout the years, and vaguely speaking I’d say this has been a moderate success (y’know, being an MIT Blogger now etc. I literally get paid to contribute to my own history book in the form of blogposts). And when I first started out blogging, nearly everything I wrote was about coffee.

Literally to an almost insane degree.

Coffee was a part of my identity in,,, perhaps an almost unhealthy(?) way. Not really unhealthy, but I was drinking a lot of coffee while writing these blogposts. Which is perhaps, inadvisable.

Back to the point: I’ve started drinking less coffee(?!?!) truly wild. Who would’ve thought, drinking 3-4 cups of straight-up black coffee a day was unsustainable. But what is almost weirder than drinking less coffee, is that I have been substituting this drink with TEA?????

I used to hate tea. But to be fair, I also used to hate drinking coffee. Have I talked about this before? (Scrolls through various blogposts I have written so far) No I haven’t! Yay! Insert digression here:

When I was in my sophomore year of high school, I took this writing class called English 1A– tldr it was intro to writing and reading course. It was about as interesting as the tldr sounds. But throughout this six week class, we had to write three four page papers and one massive 15 page paper.

Around this same time, I hated coffee. But, I started wanting to be someone who drank coffee. I thought it would make me cool, which, it didn’t inherently? But coffee did make me a more well-rounded person. Anyways.

So what I did, was I sat down with a cup of coffee and the prompt of each essay and said “either I finish this cup of coffee or a rough draft of my essay”. The first three papers I wrote I couldn’t finish the cup, but by the fourth I was a coffee drinking expert. Plus, I had found a whole new community of people to become a part of.

This was the long and short of the story, but for a full length short story on this I wrote read this. Okay, end digression here.

In any case, I also used to hate tea. I thought it tasted like weird water, which to be frank was also the reason I used to hate hot chocolate made with water. I later realized this was because I was making them wrong.⁠01 i.e. my ratios were just <em>way</em> off-- I was doing like a 1% hot cocoa mix to 99% water ratio. Which unsurprisingly, makes it taste like water.

Now, I drink tea nearly daily. Mint tea to be precise.

It all started one night while I was working on a problemset with friends. It was about midnight, and I wanted something warm to drink, to which my friend⁠02 Omar if you are reading this, hi! He's a huge tea drinker. recommended tea. I thought I would try it again, and bada bing bada boom I was hooked.

It weirdly makes me feel more like an adult. Like I am someone who doesn’t need to be running on caffeine 24/7 to simply exist. Which, there is nothing wrong with existing that way, but frankly it was making me tired. It is rather annoying to be both wired from coffee and simultaneously tired (which MIT is prone to make you feel).

There’s a character in Dimension 20⁠03 a Dungeons and Dragons show I and numerous other bloggers watch who I relate this concept to: Esther Sinclair. At one point in the show, Esther is described to be the sort of person who drinks tea throughout the day, and drinks decaffeinated coffee for dessert.

And let me tell you: that slaps. Thank you Brennan Lee Mulligan for putting this concept of a personality trait into my brain. Because now I want to be the type of person who drinks tea throughout the day and coffee at night, which I couldn’t have been before I started liking tea.

But now, I can be the sort of person who can go out with a friend and drink tea or coffee or whatever.

I don’t super know how to end this blogpost. I mostly started writing this because it’s become a part of who I am now. Not like, in some crucially fundamental way (compared to coffee which fundamentally changed me by introducing me to my town’s community), but it has changed me. And where else to talk about it then in the blogs– to keep some track record of who I am, who I am becoming, and who I might become.

Who knows what else will change about me in the next year, or next ten years, or twenty. Excited to find out. For now, going to keep stealing tea from dining halls.

Random ending note: This blogpost was written during a pre-CPW event hosted for prefrosh! (The event was called “Write about Tea (with tea (with Paige))” and thus the title of the blogpost.) I drank green tea while writing this and while hanging out with cool prefrosh. Go to these events and hang out! They are fun! I think this is fun.