I bought the worst tea the other day!

That’s really all you have to read, but I’m going to elaborate.

I have been out of tea for a while because I don’t drink it.

That’s not exactly true. There are three hundred packets of stale Lipton tea in my pantry right now because I buy a new box for my mother every time she comes to visit, but nobody I’ve ever met other than my mother drinks Lipton tea. This spans more than one continent, because when my mother was in Paris she told every waiter we had that they didn’t have “the good tea.”

I occasionally have some chamomile on hand for days when my stomach’s a little upset or I feel like I’m catching a cold. Green tea can go fuck itself. Why do people drink this tea that tastes like metal shavings? I do not get it.

But I understand that sometimes I should drink things that aren’t coffee or wine. I want to be able to do this, I just haven’t found anything else as satisfying. I haven’t given up.

I don’t fast or cleanse or detox because I am honest with my ability to have the willpower required to starve myself for days. As animals, our most basic instinct is to make sure we eat. We kill things every day just so we eat, and we always have for as long as we’ve existed. Those things we kill also kill things every day just so they can eat. The only reason I can imagine we need to take a day or a week off from eating is because we are trying to enter some kind of hallucinatory altered state that comes just before you lapse into a coma. Since I’m not seeking that kind of miserable enlightenment, I eat food at least once a day.

That doesn’t mean I don’t want to achieve all this “I FEEL GREAT” bullshit people who are high off cleansing (or, as science calls it: “starvation”) claim to be experiencing. I would love to know that my organs were detoxing, that free radicals were sloughing off my innards, that with every hungry minute I was becoming a healthier person.

That’s why they make herbal teas, right? So you can do that with just one cup a day? I mean, honestly, I can’t figure out any other reason to drink green tea. It is the worst.

So I’m wandering through the “ethnic foods” aisle the other day and I came across a section that could have been called “Bags of herbs and dried leaves you don’t understand because you do not have a Mexican grandma.” And it looked like the kind of magic I wanted. And there was one that was like, “For your liver and your gall bladder.”

Hey! I drink coffee and wine almost every day! (almost = sometimes more than once a day) I bet my liver needs some tea-relief! If I could drink this liver tea, opening the secrets of the ancients inside my intestines, then it’ll be like I went on some kind of four-hundred dollar, GOOP-approved scam-sham! All of the cleanse, none of the cash. This box costs two dollars? Sign me up.

This is how I ended up bringing home a box of Boldo tea. Boldo! It’s kinda Peruvian! I’ve been to Peru! I am worldly! This is what worldly people drink! Worldly, healthy people. This was going to be the first step toward the way-detoxed, super-skinny, glowy-skinned, pristined-livered me.

So the other night, instead of pouring a glass of wine to sip while watching Justified, I got all Gwyneth on myself and was like, “No. I will have a cleansing cup of tea.”

As soon as I removed the plastic wrap surrounding the box, I knew I had made a mistake. It smelled like feet. The whole kitchen immediately smelled like the inside of an Ugg boot. But I persevered. Maybe it wouldn’t smell that way once it was brewed. Maybe it tasted better than it smelled, especially once I added half a lemon’s worth of juice to it.

I’m just going to skip to the part where I tell you that it didn’t. It somehow tasted worse. It tasted like a licorice stick someone found inside their Ugg boot. One that had been dipped in lemon juice.

But I tried. I tried holding my breath while I sipped. I tried imagining I was drinking a potion made by a healer and focused on my liver squeezing out years of martinis and vodka tonics.

I got about three sips and one scene into Justified before I called the whole thing off. At one point I thought I was going to throw up, which would definitely count as cleansing, but ultimately I ended up just sitting around whining and complaining, which everybody knows is a form of stress relief.

Me and Danny Zuko don’t like tea!

And now I don’t know what to do with this box of foul. It seems wasteful to throw it away. It seems racist to ask the housekeeper if she likes that tea. It seems mean to give it to any of my friends. There’s no Goodwill for shitty tea, and I’m afraid to try to use the leaves for anything else because they stink like feet-waves.

Then I read up on it a little more and it says if you drink too much of it at once, you can die. Should they be selling that shit at Albertsons? I mean, that was nowhere on the box. What if I had made up my own liver cleanse and killed myself with some foot tea?

So, consider this my public service announcement. I almost died of Boldo tea so now you don’t have to. And once again, green tea: go fuck yourself.