And the rest is...

I need to brush up on my Spanish, because as I was doing research on Yerba Mate (which I have started drinking to replace my recently acquired habit of taking a Stacker in the morning- too expensive), I discovered that in South America, it’s treated as more of a social ritual rather than just a beverage. It’s brewed in a hollowed-out gourd and passed around a circle. The ritual has lots of rules and stuff that I won’t go into now. It is sipped from the gourd using a metal straw with a filter at the top, so no one accidentally ingests the icky leaves while preserving the delicious, bountiful germs everyone contributes with their old tongues. This ritual even has a verb to describe it- matear. Which I TOTALLY thought was matar for two days (before finally succumbing to my scandalized psyche and performing a two-second internet search proving me wrong). Ah, the difference one letter makes. I was about to go South and start partaking in the “ritual,” which apparently has no legal consequences in that lawless region of natural cocaine and antioxidant-tinged murder.