Party in my head!

Listening to Passion Pit over headphones in the quiet section of the library feels like there's a party only in my head. Guy sitting next to me, why aren't you bobbing to the beat? Why is it just Passion Pit that makes me hallucinate? Only two more exams and then it's back to the Chi.

I don't know... it's like no cheese I've ever tasted...

At the wine-tasting I talked about in the last post, we were also served a platter of cheese.  There were some normal-er ones (Comté and Gruyère), a Morbier that was less pungent than others I've tried, and a new cheese I'd never had before called Fleur du Maquis.  The first three were good and looked and tasted very much like you'd expect, but here's a picture of a Fleur du Maquis:

Yes, the fluffy white stuff is mold.  The twiggy bits are rosemary and some other herbs.  

I fluctuate from being proud that I ate it to being mortified about it.  There is no doubt that this cheese looks ungodly, but its flavors are really interesting.  The truth is, it does taste moldy.  It's got that perfume-y taste of mold that you would recognize from getting a whiff when looking into a too-old bag of bread.  But on top of that, there's a great woodsy, herb flavor, and the cheese inside is also quite delicious, but in the, well, reassuringly boring, normal realm of how cheese tastes.  

I've always fancied myself an adventurous eater (note that I do have a line though, and I drew it at earthworms), but this one tested my enthusiasm.  As I chewed it, I replayed the little introduction to it the  group-leader gave, making sure "the rind is edible" was indeed said.  It took me until today (three days after the tasting) to feel comfortable that nothing bad is going to happen as a result.  So far, so good.  If you see that thing, eat it.  I dare you.

Tasting Wine

Another great wine-tasting session.  I certainly picked the right student club to press as much value out of my education as possible.  My neighbor in the classroom where the session was held told me about how he started liking wine when, as a twelve year-old boy, his parents took him wine-tasting in France.  He said, "I didn't start my drinking on a park-bench with a paper bag or anything like that. Ha ha."  That prompted me to recount my own story of how I came to appreciate wine, which begins with the summer I spent in Paris after my sophomore year in college when my classmates and I drank €2-3 wines with names like Bastardi every night until one of us had to be hospitalized with a kidney stone.  After that, liking the taste of good wine was easy.  I suppose this isn't too far removed from starting on a park-bench.

Misery Bear

Have you seen the Misery Bear series?  If you haven't, you should -

Misery Bear World Cup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qXqRy89zbs
Misery Bear Goes to Work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dTHlTu_DC8&feature=related

Hopefully without revealing too much, Misery Bear is an unfortunate bear who can never be fully happy, and the main premise of the series is that shit/life happens.  We, the audience, learn to love him and understand his sins, and we root for him, all the while knowing that he will be crushed, and dreading the inevitable heartbreak we will suffer alongside.  We love him because we identify a little bit of ourselves in him, and recognize some of the pain he feels when he can't have something he really wants, or when he despairs.

If you have also seen The Office (BBC), Mr. Bean, and, to a lesser extent, Peepshow, you may agree with me when I say I think the Brits have an obsession with misery.  First, please note that, generally, the British television I watch reach me only after extensive vetting by trusted friends who then vehemently recommend them, so this probably only refers to particularly good British shows.  Even so, if you compare them with the particularly good shows in the US (Community, Arrested Development, 30 Rock), the ratio of beatings-of-the-human-soul to shiny-fuzzy-resolution is much, much higher in the former.  It seems the British prefer commiserating with characters who are likely worse off than they are, in more "realistic" conditions, to characters who overcome the obstacles of life, and find success in conditions that are more fantasy.  (SPOILERS) David Brent was completely broken before they allowed him a little redemption at the Christmas special.  Mark Corrigan, who does everything right, gets sacked.  The (initial) girl of his dreams turns out to be a nightmare after he gets her.  And Mr. Bean is, well, Mr. Bean.  There's stuff like that in American shows too of course (Liz Lemon inexplicably breaks up with Matt Damon), but it's just no where near the same extent.  I could put on a psychoanalyst paper hat and speculate on what historical experiences the two nations have had that brought about this difference in affinity, but I don't want to sound like an idiot.  I just wanted to point out that it's something I noticed.

As for me, I enjoy all the shows I've listed.  Every now and then, I do wish American shows could be a little braver and embrace the depressing piece of shit that life sometimes is in a comedic, fraternal way.  But right now, thanks to Hulu, Netflix, 4oD and iPlayer, I get just the right amount of Community et al. and Misery Bear and co.

The End of the Beginning

I have noticed that I am most often gripped by a desire to write when I am feeling moody, and after a bit of thought, I propose that this is true for the general population.  It seems natural that you are more pensive when in a state of depression, because the depression forces you to stop activity and pay attention to thoughts.  For the same reason, I think it would make the depressed more likely to hypothesize, theorize, and speculate, perhaps about the injustice that first caused the depression, or, more commonly (at least for me), about the nature of the world, existential questions, the meaning of it all, etc., etc.  Maybe the opportunity to write generally presents itself more readily when you’re depressed.  Depression, whether causally or correlatedly, seems to happen when you’re in your room with your computer screen and keyboard sitting right there, already on and ready to go.

I have also realized that those subjects (existentialism, meaning of it all, nature of the world) can veer dangerous close to the territory of whinging, especially when the ponderer is doing so through a lens with a negative hue.  So I have decided to beat my urge to write while in those states.  Or beat those states when I have an urge to write.  Whichever is easier.  

The Beginning of the Beginning

I generate an idea once in a while.  These days I frequently find myself sitting in my small room in London just thinking, especially when the room is oppressively untidy with the tiny bit of workspace it has piled high with stacks of paper, packets of digestive biscuits, and pocketfuls of electronics.  And often this is when I’ll mull.  These ideas, when they have just been conjured in my head by something I read or saw, start out like a little blobs of water that have been splashed onto paper, and slowly seep into it – first they’re nice, well-formed and discrete, but after a little seeping, all that’s left of each is a bit of crinkle.  I have wanted to record them, perhaps even share them with others, but I’ve never really been able to.  If a blob of water already seems insignificant and forgettable, by the time it gets to be a crinkle, having lost its original form, it’s just too difficult to tease out what it had been and why it was splashed there to begin with.  So this blog is intended to allow me a quick, easy method of capturing my little beads of insignificant thoughts before I neglect them and can no longer remember why I had decided to label them as ideas.