Tea and sympathy

When I worked for years and years at a non-profit, we had these words for new staffers: don’t treat this as a place where we all come together and drink herbal tea and talk about our relationship problems. This is a place of work! Write grants, keep regular hours, and don’t spend time on the phone with your sweetie.

It had to be said. Private sector jobs can be terrifying. Non-profit organizations pay less and it is hard to get some employees to take their work seriously. The metaphor of tea-sipping on the job stuck in my head and I always combined herbal tea drinking with the type of person who would also keep a journal and talk about their inner feeling on all occasions, including at work. Ugh.

I like herbal tea and I'm okay with feeling-talk, but the combination left me ...cold.

When I started blogging I hadn’t, I don’t think, a "blogger voice" – to use writers’ fave little characterization (“you’re just developing your voice” one travel editor once told me when I gave her a travel story to look over). But I absolutely positively knew one thing. Ocean was not going to be a journal-type blog. You know, of the type: and I did this and this and I feel that and that. NO!

I do not take journal writing seriously – I kept journals when I was a kid and stopped (for the most part) as an adult. It seemed even more self-indulgent than blogging, if you can imagine (okay, kill me all you journal writers! I just do not like any of the journals I ever wrote. In fact, five years ago, I took a big trash bag, packed some twenty journals that I had written as a young adult into it and threw the whole heap away in the trash container next to Bagels Forever. I had almost died a couple of years earlier and one nagging thought I had then was that if I did die, someone inevitably would read the garbage I wrote and think I was demented.)

So today I am sitting at a blogger’s kitchen table and sipping herbal tea brought over by another blogger and they tell me: Ocean is awfully much like a journal…

NO! IT IS NOT!

So there.

ang, tonya, tea