Thinking about Drinking

I love alcohol.  I really do.  I love the ritual, I enjoy the tastes, I love the care and appreciation that go into crafting new and interesting flavors, and I'm a big fan of the way I can have an entire experience about tasting a 6 ounce glass of something.  I would love to learn to have that same experience about non-alcoholic drinks.  Honestly, I'm not sure the intoxication is much of the appeal for me. 

I've been thinking about the "Five Hour Energy" drink commercials lately in a related context.  The characters on the commercials say that the energy shot is "better" than coffee.  It may be, in the way that a shot of everclear is better than a glass of beer or wine.  This is something I just don't get.  I mean, I'll be the first to admit that I am addicted to caffeine.  I do get headaches if I don't have it.  But I could address the addiction with pills for a lot less time, energy, and empty calories than I spend on coffee, and I don't, because I enjoy the experience of coffee. 

I think alcohol is the same way.  Going out for a drink or sharing a drink with friends is a special experience for a lot more reasons than the intoxication, and I get intoxicated a lot faster and deeper than I'm comfortable with. I'm also noticing more and harsher hangovers as I get older (grr.)  So, if I can learn to make non- or lower-alcohol drinks an experience in the same way, this seems like a win-win for me.  I do well with session beers taking up the same social space.  I've also enjoyed "mocktails" when they've been offered, but there's something missing, and I think it's more attitude than alcohol. 

Monkeys like to climb

So, here's a thing: I've taken an aerials class this month.  Twice.  There's a place close enough that I can get to it where they hang stuff from the ceiling and let you climb on it.  It's freaking awesome.  It's also freaking hard.  Upper body strength, not so much.  But there is enough that I can do that it encourages me to keep trying for the stuff that I currently can't do.  The aerials class takes an hour, and does a little silks, a little trapeze, and a little aerial hoop.  I like spinning on the hoop.  I say "wheeeee!" and then everyone stares.  This is how much I like spinning.

I haven't had anything active that I enjoyed doing since we stopped playing Dance Dance Revolution, so this is awesome on a couple of levels.

I think I really missed doing this.  Posting, I mean. I could probably do this more often. 

Meme via Willowanderer

I liked this one.

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I got Four More Measures: the phenomenon of starting singing too early. You should have waited four more measures.

Actually, I think that people really do see me that way. I finish other people's sentences. I jump the gun. I'm an impulsive planner. I'm also told that my embarrassment is often endearing.

Four More Measures, indeed.

Diary: December 2011

Sigh. Cards didn't happen. I was thinking they'd be New Year's Cards. Now I'm wondering if I'll have time for St. Patrick's Day cards.

December: We went to Vegas. This year we stayed at the Encore. Wynn has the best "courting the gay dollar" website I've seen for the major resorts, so I've been wanting to try there. The Wynn/Encore complex also has the most vegan-friendly menus I've seen at any of the resorts. I really liked it, and would definitely go back.

Work continues to be the biggest thing in my life, and as I'm not comfortable writing about it in this context, I hope this goes partway to explaining why I don't post as much as I used to.

I did get a Xmas tree this year. This was the first year I've ever had my own "real" tree. In college, I used to have a plywood tree with cuphooks screwed into it that I could hang ornaments on. It was cute, and space efficient, but I wanted the smell. Grayskale was out of town for a business trip when I got it, so I got to set up the tree as a surprise. I covered it with black and gold ornaments, and put a tinfoil Stanley Cup on top so it was our Bruins Tree. It made me happy.

New Year's Eve found me out at a "drinking" party, which I haven't done for New Year's in quite a while. With the waffle party planned for the next morning, I typically don't indulge much on NYE, but this year I discovered that cognac isn't that bad, after all. I also looked up the words to "Auld Lang Syne." I didn't realize that the opening line is an rhetorical question: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot?" I had assumed this was "should" in the sense of "If it is forgotten", not "should you forget about this?" That was an entertaining surprise, as was the bluegrass rendition of Auld Lang Syne that I cued up to play at midnight. Didn't realize that was bluegrass. It was jarring.

The waffle party is technically in January, but is part of my holiday tradition, so I may as well cover it now. This year's challenge was Gluten-Free waffles. I think they came out OK, but could have been better. The cocoa-Teff were probably the biggest hit, although I liked the pumpkin-cornmeal ones a lot. However, all the gluten-free waffles lacked a certain wafflosity that I plan to keep working on.

Holiday cards 2011

I'm starting to plan my holiday cards a little late this year. Let me know if you want one. Form not embedded? Click here to view form.

Diary: May 2011-November 2011

Whoops. I let myself get way behind again. To sum up:

May: We went to a Bruins playoff game, and took a weekend trip to Hartford. We hosted "Game of Thrones" viewing parties, and saw Justin Vivian Bond perform. On a sadder note, Grayskale and I both suffered deaths in the family: my grandfather and Grayskale's uncle.

June: The Bruins won the Stanley cup, and I spent my birthday at the rally welcoming the cup to Boston. Grayskale and I tried vacationing outside of Vegas and discovered it wasn't bad at all. I got a sunburn, but that was the worst of it.

July: I saw a deliciously geeky musical: "2010: Our Hideous Future". I spent a lot of time watching a rabbit in our back yard.

August: Grayskale started a new job, and took a week off between. I took a day off to go to Canobie Lake Park with him during his break. I held a Play in Public game night at Cambridge Brewing Company. Hurricane Irene knocked a chimney into our bedroom window. Another death: Grayskale's grandmother passed away.

September: We took another long-weekend vacation and had a lovely time despite chilly, rainy weather. We signed up for our annual fantasy football and hockey leagues. After nine years as a couple, Grayskale and I also started using a joint credit card. Sadly, we also ended up removing Wednesday game nights from our regular weekly social schedule.

October: We went to a hockey game, and I held a pumpkin-beer tasting on Halloween, which was lovely. I worked a lot.

November, so far: We're in the process of refinancing the mortgage. We voted. I had jury duty, but didn't get impaneled. I've had a cold for the past week, which forced me to sit still long enough to realize I was 6 months behind updating. ;)

How've you been?

The Uniform

I've tried to maintain the fiction (at least in my own head) that practicality trumps appearance for me. But, like most other things in my life, this seems to be about control. I do enjoy spending time on my appearance, but I don't like having to spend time on my appearance, if that makes sense. I feel the same way about eating and sleeping, honestly. If I could do them only when I chose to... well, I'd add yet another prioritization problem to my life. It would probably just frustrate me.

In order to take control of "time spent on appearance", one of the things I did was self-impose a uniform. I've just realized that this experiment started in 2007, although I didn't really make a big deal out of it until 2009. It started with black button-down shirts. It doesn't matter to anyone but me, but it makes me happy, and I've slowly standardized my wardrobe over the past couple of years so I have different weights of the same outfit for different weather conditions. I find a particular garment I like and buy 2 weeks worth of it to get through the laundry/dry cleaning cycle.

The factors that define the uniform to me are:

1. Shirt: black, button down, black buttons, breast pocket
2. Trousers: grey, flat front, no cuff, buttoned pockets.
3. Shoes, hat, and belt: black
4. Optional Jacket: matching grey suit jacket only
5. Overcoats: black

This has been causing me some small amount of consternation over the past three months since I started my new job. It's a tie-wearing office. This isn't a problem, per se, but I just can't get comfortable with ties and shirt sleeves. Honestly, I'd rather go jacket and no tie than tie and no jacket. But I wore a jacket the first day, and my boss came and (jokingly, I think) said we'd have to "do something about that." I switched to sweaters. I can live with sweater and tie. Until we hit mid-April, and heat became an issue. Now I'm on (black) vest and tie.

It still felt like the "uniform" to me, but my therapist (who I've been seeing since late 2009, so she's only ever known me in the uniform) commented that between the sweaters and the vests, it felt like I was adding a dizzying amount of variety to my wardrobe. I'm surprised to find that this comment bothered me.

Maybe that's why I haven't talked about the uniform online before (at least, as far as Google and I can tell). Committing to it out loud makes it feel like something other people can judge. When I've mentioned it to people who asked (and when drinking, to people who haven't), their first response is often to look for exceptions.

I propose that the right question to ask when confronted with someone else's arbitrary-self-imposed-retrictions isn't "when do you break it?" but "why is it fun?"

Diary: April 2011

April Photos

April was pretty awesome, I think.

I didn't talk about it in the March summary, but it was important. I stopped logging everything. I stopped recording every calorie I ate, every drink I drank, every cigarette I smoked, every store I visited. I have found it both difficult and easy (in a way I'm having trouble verbalizing) to give up the tracking of my own life. I think food it less frustrating, but I keep being frustrated that I don't have the data. By April, I stopped trying to do the Photo-Per-Day project, and it felt OK. Not great, but OK. I feel like it was kind of a failure, but I also feel like I have a lot more time. Not in any chunks big enough to add an activity, but I feel less hurried all the time. I don't have 3 or 4 things to log on my phone every time I change location.

On a related note, I changed phones. Grayskale and I switched from theiPhone 3G to the HTC ThunderBolt. As Grayskale says: "the speed makes up for the instability." That pretty much sums up our experience. For example, one of my favorite applications, Words With Friends: on the iPhone, I'd open the app, get myself a drink, head outside, and then see if my turn had loaded. On the Thunderbolt, I open the app, and about 50% of the time, I have to relaunch it before I can play. 10% of the time, it crashes badly enough that I have to sign in again. The other 40% of the time, I can just play. But in all these cases, it's still faster than waiting for my turn to load on iOS4. My favorite Thunderbolt story goes like this: our friend M has an iPhone 3G also. He was shopping online for his girlfriend, and the pages were loading really slowly. I turned my Thunderbolt into a WiFi hotspot, and he tried using the connection through my phone and his phone went faster. The network loading is ridiculous. Speed tests indicate that our mobile network is faster than our "high speed" cable internet connection. It's lovely.

In other news, the Bruins are in the playoffs, and we signed up for HBO to watch A Game of Thrones. I'm really enjoying it. Since we had access to HBO anyway, we started watching True Blood. What a delightful guilty pleasure that is. I'm still not an Anna Paquin fan (I will never forgive the planet for allowing her to be Rogue), but this is a fun piece of fluff.

Mostly, I think, I emerged from one of the worst cases of seasonal depression I've ever gone through. Luckily, it doesn't hit me that hard. But this seems like it was a particularly tough winter all around, and I'm glad it's over.