I Bought Shitting Tea!

I was at the grocery store with Pearl, right? And anybody who knows knows that shopping with a 2-year-old should get people nominated for Peace prizes--the 2-year-old and her intense social and physical discovery, the umpteen million shoppers who believe that they would do a better job being a parent to your child than you're doing, the dimwit 13-year-old cashiers and the Senior Bagging Clerks.

So I find myself in the tea/coffee Aisle. My colleague, bastard-who-did-not-create-myspace-url, has been talking up tea. But the tea at work is the dime-store variety and frankly, I am a bit of a snob. Coffee is drugs, and I'll drink tepid bathwater if somebody writes coffee on it, but tea--tea is like English or something, right? Should be savoured (see what I did there?) and enjouyed (again, less artfully). And I'm thinking, gee. I could go for some decent fruity tea for work. I wonder what's on sale!

Why I didn't just stick with Stash, I shall never understand. Oh wait. It's because I'm a cheap-ass single mother with too much to do and not enough time.

There's a beautiful red box. It has a marvelous Eastern pattern on the front. It says, "licorice," "individually wrapped," and the best, "slimming." The combination feels right and a tantrum and 15 minutes later, I own the beautiful red box. [Is it a coincidence, I wonder, that I purchased 2 red shirts and a red scarf at the Old Navy a short 2 hours later?]

I am feeling rather proud of the purchase, I am thinking, "even with my toddler, I make savvy and attractive impulse buys!" Wrong. For so many reasons.

I get home and the toddler monster is napping. I think I shall have a cup of tea. A trial run.

I read the box. I notice that the fine print looks awfully fine.

As it turns out, the tea is an "intestinal cleanser" made as a "dietary aid" during "weight loss programs."

I thought slimming was a word to get monkeys to buy stuff like coffee is a word that gets me to drink stuff. Slimming always has fine print, like, must do 500 50 lb curls daily in order for this to actually do any slimming. Right?

Not only does the tea seem to intend to deliver exactly what it's promised, there are about 4 box-sides worth of instructions. I am too afraid for the trail run. All I wanted was pomegranate or raspberry. Licorice sounded good, too!

Don't drink more than 16 ounces of this tea daily.
Don't use if pregnant or nursing.
Don't consume next to a fella named Ron.
Brew two minutes during initial doses. Eventually work up to personal taste.

I'm not making this up. (except maybe for ron.)

I took the pretty red box to work anyway.

I made a cup of tea.

I did not, as is my tradition, allow the bag to steep during the entire tea consumption. I brewed it fewer than 2 minutes.

The tea tasted a bit like warm dirt.

The tea did, in fact, make me shit.

A lot.

It also gave me gas.

Moral: check tea boxes more carefully in future. Understand implicit oxymoron in "savvy impulse buy."