We are a ridiculous culture when it comes to booze.
I have found it really baffling and frustrating in my life (in DARE, in high school health class, in college classes where I was learning all kinds of social worky things like harm reduction strategies and addictive personalities) when teachers would say DRUGS and ALCOHOL. Um, alcohol’s a drug. Must we differentiate because it is liquid? No, I suppose it’s that whole legality issue. Which is something I will not touch right now.
It preoccupies an unnecessary amount of my time and socializing, people define themselves at great length by what alcoholic beverages they consume, and I spent hours on Christmas Eve with my family discussing banana daquiris vs gin & tonic vs rum & coke as signifiers of gender sexuality and open-mindedness. I have also been informed that old ladies drink gin and tonics in the summertime, which makes sense because I first had one at a picnic table with the old ladies from my parent’s church when I was 19. I then proceeded to order it at bars when I decided that ordering cosmopolitans was laughable and other things like tequila sunrises and white russians were not cute after I was 21. (And now I am 24. Watch and be amazed.)
I didn’t really drink in college-the person I was dating had extensive complicated reasons for not drinking and it was easier to avoid conflict by not drinking, though it eventually came to the point where we would drink Mike’s and play boggle. I now refuse to drink Mike’s-though apparently it’s unnecessary because….that’s disgusting, and such is the quality of the people I hang out with.
But foody-ism aside and being a Seattlite that’s snobby about things like coffee and cheese; I know so many people that drink two buck chuck after blowing paychecks and foodstamps on organic produce. It’s incongruous. And while I will praise Elysian over all other breweries (It’s in my neighborhood, and a guy I went to middle school with brews for them. My biases are very specific.) I can only tell you what I like after I put it in my mouth. I am only barely beginning to put words to my preferences particularly as far as beer is concerned.
I’m developing superstitions around wine in particular; mostly I bought a particular bottle of wine; it’s got a beautiful label, and I bought that wine and drank it on new year’s which was a beautiful beginning to a new year, and I want to retain that same spirit of delight and a lovely balance of intrigue and familiarity throughout the rest of the year. It is also a red wine which I only recently started buying for myself. However, the wine itself is fairly unappealing. This is disappointing, but it is wine and it took a few months of convincing for me to agree that Carlo Rossi was not a suitable thing to serve at a party, unless you are going to a potluck in which case people will probably find you amusing. Really; if you want to get them drunk, and are willing to inebriate whatever five people showed up with hummus and pita, they deserve what they can get.
People are snobby about beer; I don’t drink beer at home much because for whatever reason the people I hang out with appreciate good beer but will drink shitty wine with a pretty label. Or maybe they just drink what I hand them and don’t complain.
I cooked tonight, but it wasn’t anything you haven’t heard about before; sometime in the near future I will assign things like tags to my posts for greater searching capacity.
Also I should probably divine exciting new things to make out of chard.
And while my crossover has not been intentional, I do not want to eat very much meat these days. Which is like vegetarian. My housemate who knows about these things told me my blood type was well-suited to vegetarianism.
