One of the things I am most fond of in this world is a South American tea called Yerba maté. For those of you unaware of this wonderful substance, Yerba maté is a highly caffeinated tea that looks sort of like grass clippings. It has an earthy taste, and has similar effects to coffee, in terms of the jolt of energy you will get from drinking it. While coffee tends to dehydrate you, and can leave you feeling jittery and anxious, with a crash at a certain point, I find Yerba maté actually works to hydrate; the crash is almost non-existent, and you tend to come down from your buzz, or high, at a slower rate. Also, Yerba maté is incredibly cheap, as long as you don’t get it from tea houses. Go to any middle eastern grocer, greek grocer, and purchase the tea, as the rates will be drastically lower. For example, I pay between 6-7$/kg of Yerba maté, vs. 35$/kg at a tea house. If anyone’s looking for a place, the Kalamatta(sp?) grocer on 11th street and 15th ave SW (in Calgary, of course) provides it, along with many other teas at an incredibly cheap rate. I think my tea budget for six months is about 20$, and I drink usually 3-4 small pots of tea a day. If you can beat that with coffee, without having some sort of slave labour in your basement, then you have some hook ups that I clearly do not.
In terms of my life, I’m going on to my second year of my Master’s in Computational Media Design. I have a thesis topic; I’m working on musical instruments on digital tabletops, and trying to make them both easy to use and fostering collaborative interaction. I’ll try and post videos of this, but I really don’t know what I can or can’t show until I’ve submitted the paper to a conference. UIST will be my preferred conference for it, and I’m really hoping to get in. So, in April there may be videos if I can’t post one in the upcoming weeks. Just know that it’s sweet, and that it will (hopefully) blow your fucking socks off. Not just your sucks–your fucking socks. A side note: does anyone else think “fucking” makes a great adjective? It’s ambiguous, completely impossible to understand if you’re not a native speaker, and adds to the overall level of potty mouth in society, but it just seems to have that oomph that makes me wanna stand up and take notice. Take notice of my fucking socks. Taking notice of my socks, unfortunately, makes me aware of the holes in them. I should probably resolve that. I think I’m down to less than three pairs of socks without holes. Shit.
Anyways, I’ll try to update more. Hopefully the updates will get funnier, and involve less conversations about the word fuck and about my socks. This is, unfortunately, the type of stuff I think about. It’s safe to say I’ll probably die alone.
