Tea

I've always been into tea. When I was nine or ten I insisted on having a tea party, though this was more about being an Anglophile and wanting to have fancy chocolates and cucumber sandwiches than the tea. And for a while in high school, tea was the drink of choice. But by college, I hardened into a full fledged coffee addict and the whole tea thing sort of went away.

I think part of the problem in college was that the tea, like the meat, in the dinning hall was shit. I gave up both after a few weeks. Further adding to this was the coffee house culture prevalent in college. It was easy to sit and have three or for cups of coffee-- free refills-- but drinking tea meant buying another tea bag. Even once I moved off campus, drinking tea had a number of obstacles, namely, the kitchen. Shared between seven guys, the kitchen was never exactly in the sort of condition that would pass a health inspection, which really meant making tea was completely out of the question.

I rediscovered tea a few years ago after graduating from college. Don't get me wrong, I was and still am a coffee addict. If I could inject coffee, I probably would. But once I was into a somewhat cleaner post-college living situation, the idea of boiling a kettle of water for tea was a whole lot more reasonable. I bought a kettle and tea pot. I stocked up on Earl Grey and a Twinnings mixed pack that had Prince of Whales, English and Irish Breakfast, and Lady Grey.

Growing up, my mother, being something of an old hippie, stocked a whole collection of Celestial Seasonings herbal teas in all sorts of various flavors. For a long while, that's all I thought tea was. Then I discovered Earl Grey and there was no going back. I've gone through all sorts of phases, adding honey or lemon or sugar or milk or drinking it black. But at the end of the day, Earl Grey is really my tea of choice. Then came the green tea.

I started mixing things up a bit with a cup of green tea every about a year ago. Green tea is somewhat lighter in flavor and certainly lacks the floral bouquet that comes with a cup of Earl Grey. It is also, if you believe the mythology that some marketing executive came up with, healthy and rejuvenating. There is also the legend that the finest green tea was once picked by virgins wearing silk gloves and snipping with gold scissors. Which myth is motivating me? Anyway, I drink the Tazo gourmet green tea or an Asian brand with packaging covered in Chinese characters, and it was good. But then along came White Tea.

I picked up a package of white tea the other day. White tea is a lot like Green tea, though a little bit lighter and not quite as dry. Coincidentally, I also recently discovered that the office water cooler dispenses hot water at the perfect temperature for brewing bag tea. Bag tea should not be brewed in boiling water, but rather a few degrees below boiling to avoid bitter flavors.

Before my discovery that the hot water tap actually works, I had been drinking tea strictly at home, usually in the evening. Now though, I start the day with a cup of coffee, or two, and continue with tea throughout the day. Then at home for the evening, I'll have another round of tea or alternately, an espresso.

Though not a substitute for a proper cup of coffee, tea has earned its place on my table. And my desk. And anywhere else I can find warm water and teabag.

The Grocery Store

I once enjoyed going to the grocery store. Trips to the grocery guaranteed I'd be coming home with fun knew things, but there was none of the guilt that comes with paying retail at the mall. That was the old days though, when I regularly shopped at the suburban mega mart with fresh food and empty checkout lines.

Sadly though, my trips to the grocery store are more like high school. I say its like high school because as a hormone filled, pre-teen geek, high school was nothing more than a daily frustration, just as the local super market is.

Here's the rub: there are no gourmet supermarkets in my neighborhood. There are small gourmet groceries, but not the sorts of shops large enough to actually do your grocery shopping at. And there supermarkets, but not the fancy-- and by fancy I mean clean and properly stocked-- that populate the suburbs. Sure, I could take the subway into Manhattan and visit a number of Whole Foods markets, or Chelsea Markets, or Trader Joes, all of which are to the foodie what a college fraternity party on ecstasy is to a sexually frustrated high school geek.

But lets face it, no one wants to ride the subway to do their grocery shopping. That leaves ShopRite with vegetables that look like Bob Dole: old, wrinkled, and limp. Then there is the recently renovated A&P with a gourmet selection of food, though rarely on the same day of the week. Today there was lemon grass, but no ginger. Last week ginger, but no lemon grass. How is one supposed to make a curry in this town anyway?

Oh, and don't let me forget Pathmark, its bordered by project housing on two sides, so its not exactly the gourmet selection I'm hoping for. Actually, whenever I go to Pathmark I'm really only for hoping two things: one, that the store doesn't smell like a dirty diaper and that two, I make it out alive.

I long for simple pleasure of browsing through bins of ripe fruit, refrigerators of soft creamy cheese, aisles filled with foreign delights like HP sauce and Gnutella. Where are my chedder cheese filled, TGI Friday's branded frozen jalapeno poppers A&P? Where are Italian blood oranges, Shoperite? Is it really too much to ask that you have both the fresh food I need and the deep fried frozen treats I crave?

I once enjoyed grocery store shopping. Now though, it has become a chore. But I suppose the lack of Chicken & Broccoli Croissant Pockets and the inability to find imported Parmigiano Reggiano is one sacrifice I have to make to live in an "up and coming" neighborhood.

A History Of [my] Email

My very first email account was ianmac@bellatlantic.net, now defunct. This was a major victory for me since my brother was also intended to share the account. Somehow though, it was my name that was on there.

ianmac@bellatlantic.net was all over the web for some time as my primary email address dating back to 1998 or 1999. That was before spambots really innundated email addresses found online while trolling webpages. At about the same time I found out about hotmail, and of course I signed up for an account.

Sadly, some other Ian Mac-Something already had ianmac@hotmail.com, so I had to add a number. Hotmail's suggestion was 1981, my birth year, which I thought was the stupidest idea ever. So about the 47 attached to my internet handle and email addresses: there are three possible explanations, you decide which one is real. [a] 47 is a prime number and I dig prime numbers because you can't divide them, and since I'm kind of pathetic at math, not being able to divide a number is ok with me. [b] 47 is Renton's London apartment in Trainspotting. [c] Star Trek writers have a thing for the Number 47.

So in either case, after not getting ianmac@hotmail.com, and settling on ianmac47@hotmail.com, I pretty much decided I should go out and get ianmac47 for everything before someone else came along and stole if from me. [This is sort of like cybersquatting for email addresses]. So anyway, I got an ianmac47@yahoo.com, ianmac47 became my AIM screenname and so on.

Subsequently I lost my ianmac47@yahoo.com address password, so that account is no more. About this time, the hotmail account became my primary address and I started getting spam as I signed up for lots of free things online. I also phased out the bellatlantic account because hotmail stopped allowing me to use it to check POP mail from my other accounts.

When I started at Rutgers, they kindly gave me a free email address. Foolishly, I failed to acquire ianmac47@eden.rutgers.edu. Instead, I used ianmac@eden, much like my bellatlantic account. I used ianmac@eden and the hotmail account concurrently for a while. This is about the time I lost of the password to the yahoo account [and I believe there was another account someplace else also that was lost]. In either case, I didnt really like using the eden account because at the time I was only able to access it through telnet.

As it turns out, its a good thing I kept that hotmail account, because as these things happen, I was to graduate rutgers and lose that eden account. Its sort of silly when you think about it, that colleges terminate student accounts. It would be a great way for them to solicit money from students: they would always be able to keep track of them.

Anywway, when Rutgers took away my email address I hadnt used the account in a long time*. So then I started ianmacallen.com, and of course, have an email address, ianmac47 -at- ianmacallen.com. Its rarely used, but for a while I was using it for large attachments or files that were too big to keep for a long time on hotmail, which was continually overflowing, mostly with junk.

I finally started using hotmail's junk filter when I was getting about 100 pieces of spam a day. That's not alot by some poeple's standards but it was too much for me. And now when rutgers sends me solicitations for money, it usually winds up right in the trash can.

Then Gmail came along. And yes, ianmac47 works there too. Gmail was great because it can store large files, or lots of small files, which I send through cyberspace often. So why still use the hotmail account? Well, its been with me so long I can't let it go. Really, my account at ianmacallen.com is the one I'm letting go for now, since its been months since I checked it. In theory all of my blog posts go there, but again, I havent checked that in a while. Its also the catch-all for email sent at ianmacallen.com, which means random spam sent to -webmaster- at ianmacallen.com goes there.

Anyway, that's a brief history of my email accounts. Fun, right?

* There were a few mass emails sent out to all eden accounts. Some shitheads kept responding to be removed from the list. One of the last emails I sent from eden account was a reponse telling everyone on eden who had recieved the message that they shouldn't be hitting "Reply to All" to get off the list since we were all getting the emails demanding to be taken off the list. Then more idiots kept replying to all and saying they weren't, when clearly they were. That was about the time I stopped using eden entirely. RIP Ianmac@eden.rutgers.edu