Truth in Advertising...
OK, so for the last six months or so, I haven't quite slept as well as I'd like to. Then recently, a good friend told me that he had started drinking herbal tea before bed and that he felt it had really helped him. I had fond memories of Celestial Seasonings teas from my childhood (specifically the Peppermint, but that's beside the point), so last time I went to the grocery store I went looking for tea that might help me in this regard. It was on that fateful shopping trip that I happened upon this:
My immediate reaction was, "SWEET! This stuff must be DAMN GOOD at knocking you out, because clearly they got that bear knocked out hard enough to get him/her into human looking clothes and into the hammock long enough to pose for the artist, with the bird on the branch presumably chirping and everything!! That bear is totally kickin' it!" So I bought it. Before I even tried it, I was already calling it the "Bear Tranquilizer Tea."
Well, as one might guess from the title of this entry, this stuff falls quite a bit short of "Bear Tranquilizer." In fact, while it puts off a pleasant vanilla scent, it doesn't really taste like vanilla to me. As much as I hate to say it, I think I prefer this old hippy tea that Heather had called "Good Earth" to the bear tranquilizer tea, as far as relaxing effect, but the name is so... anyway, I digress.
Really though, the worst part has been my flights of imagination. I brought up the concept of bear tranquilizer tea to some friends of mine who suggested that I had merely failed to read the fine print on the box, where surely it would be written that I would have to crumble an Ambien into my cup of tea in order to get the desired effect. As chuckleworthy as that thought was, it only led to further trouble... (No. I did not put Ambien in my tea.)
Actually, as I tried to go to sleep that night, I began to "daydream" aloud (i.e. not sleeping) to Heather about what a bear, asleep, yet mobile and "hallucinating"/dreaming on Ambien (we've all heard these news reports about Ambien sleepwalkers, right? No? Google it. Or just go here) would do. Now, as much fun as it was to imagine a tranquilized bear in place of the human in some of the Ambien sleepwalker stories I've heard about on TV, I think I can definitively declare that there was no substantive effect from the "Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Vanilla" tea in terms of getting to sleep.
So, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, I call "false advertising" on Celestial Seasonings or their parent company "Hain Celestial Group" for their artistic depiction of a supposedly 'sleeping' bear, in human clothing, in a hammock, with cheerful-looking birds nearby. I can only speculate that this bear had a bear-sized dose of Ambien and is just moments away from wreaking total havoc!
My friends, I invite you to daydream, or just dream, about bears on Ambien and all the random possibilities that might entail. Just think of it! Which of your clothes would you dress the bear up in? Whose hammock would the bear lay in? What would the bear do once they got to the half-awake Ambien-sleepwalker phase? I'd speculate further, but I'm getting slightly sleepy...
My immediate reaction was, "SWEET! This stuff must be DAMN GOOD at knocking you out, because clearly they got that bear knocked out hard enough to get him/her into human looking clothes and into the hammock long enough to pose for the artist, with the bird on the branch presumably chirping and everything!! That bear is totally kickin' it!" So I bought it. Before I even tried it, I was already calling it the "Bear Tranquilizer Tea."
Well, as one might guess from the title of this entry, this stuff falls quite a bit short of "Bear Tranquilizer." In fact, while it puts off a pleasant vanilla scent, it doesn't really taste like vanilla to me. As much as I hate to say it, I think I prefer this old hippy tea that Heather had called "Good Earth" to the bear tranquilizer tea, as far as relaxing effect, but the name is so... anyway, I digress.
Really though, the worst part has been my flights of imagination. I brought up the concept of bear tranquilizer tea to some friends of mine who suggested that I had merely failed to read the fine print on the box, where surely it would be written that I would have to crumble an Ambien into my cup of tea in order to get the desired effect. As chuckleworthy as that thought was, it only led to further trouble... (No. I did not put Ambien in my tea.)
Actually, as I tried to go to sleep that night, I began to "daydream" aloud (i.e. not sleeping) to Heather about what a bear, asleep, yet mobile and "hallucinating"/dreaming on Ambien (we've all heard these news reports about Ambien sleepwalkers, right? No? Google it. Or just go here) would do. Now, as much fun as it was to imagine a tranquilized bear in place of the human in some of the Ambien sleepwalker stories I've heard about on TV, I think I can definitively declare that there was no substantive effect from the "Celestial Seasonings Sleepytime Vanilla" tea in terms of getting to sleep.
So, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, I call "false advertising" on Celestial Seasonings or their parent company "Hain Celestial Group" for their artistic depiction of a supposedly 'sleeping' bear, in human clothing, in a hammock, with cheerful-looking birds nearby. I can only speculate that this bear had a bear-sized dose of Ambien and is just moments away from wreaking total havoc!
My friends, I invite you to daydream, or just dream, about bears on Ambien and all the random possibilities that might entail. Just think of it! Which of your clothes would you dress the bear up in? Whose hammock would the bear lay in? What would the bear do once they got to the half-awake Ambien-sleepwalker phase? I'd speculate further, but I'm getting slightly sleepy...