I grow plants mainly because they make me happy. I drink tea because it makes me happy. Mint tea tastes great, and for the most part mint tea is made up of just mint. Combining two of my hobbies, I now grow my own mint to put in tea. Living in my apartment limits the amount I can harvest. Think in terms of a few pots every couple of weeks versus extra bags I get to share. Currently I have four small mint plants: spearmint, apple mint, peppermint and chocolate mint (a peppermint cultivar).
I might not be able to farm truckloads of mint, but I can learn truckloads about it, fantasizing about the days when I will have a giant garden I can unleash my invasive aromatics on. So I go to Wikipedia one night and look up mint. Not much there. I go to other sites, not much there about mint. I look through a lot of books at the nearby libraries, nothing specializing in mint.
Fed up with the lack of information available about mint, I learned the wonders (and addictions) of Wikipedia. A Wiki is a web page that can be edited real time by (almost) anyone. Make a change, and BAM! the rest of the world can see the change. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that incorporates the concepts of a wiki. Starting that night, I dug in to the sparse information available about mint (which, by the way, belongs to the same taxonomic family as oregano, thyme and other yummy herbs) and started editing it. And editing it. And organizing it. And tearing the useless crap out. Talk about addictive, if you go to almost any of the mint pages that exist on Wikipedia right now, chances are you’re looking at something I did. Oh the joy of being able to contribute!
Enough stream of consciousness blogging. I know I’ll read this tomorrow and regret being completely sober as I wrote this.