Lessons Learned While Loving Liquor
Well, I'm back to my blog, after a break of about a week. Sorry, my mood hasn't been that great. I'm having trouble finding work, and the news from Iraq isn't helping my mood. I make a conscious effort to keep my blog from becoming topical, and that was difficult this week.
Three or four weeks ago, my wife, her friend Jeff, and I were racing across Lower Manhattan in a Taxi. We had just finished some fusion Indian meal at an East Village restaurant. As I've mentioned, Jennifer and I live in the East Village, except that we're in the part that looks like Midtown, not the part with dive bars and head shops. Across the street is a cheesy dance club, while at the corner is a mediocre fast food joint, Roll-N-Roaster, which has the way overpriced Cup o' Shrimp.
The Indian restaurant was in the cool part of the East Village, far away from us, near an area called Curry Row. Predictably, Indian food from a fusion Indian restaurant is not going to be very good. For some reason, Jennifer thinks the nicer a place looks, the better the food will be. In the real world, the opposite is more usually true.
In fact, one of my general rules covers this: most items have only one exceptional quality. One good example of this is wine. I can't tell you how many times I've bought a bottle of wine that had a cool name, or an attractive label, and found the wine to taste just like bile, and trust me, we smell a lot of bile here, next to the dance club.
After all, if the wine tasted really good, it wouldn't need a clever name. This is also true with beer, which is why it was a mistake that time I bought "Flat Tire" beer. Hey, I thought the name was cute.
The same logic applies to restaurants, which explains why this fusion Indian food place was both mediocre and overpriced. The ideal Indian restaurant should be appear forgettable, maybe even seedy. Theoretically, if you want great wine, looks for the least interesting label.
Most importantly, it applies to people. Very few people are notable for more than one thing. Actually, that's one of the reasons looking for the perfect person is a waste of time -- it's much more efficient to figure out which qualities you really care about. Additionally, if people are really strong at one quality, they often don't bother to develop others. For example, I swim really well, so I don't like to do dishes.
Okay, that doesn't actually make any sense, but here's a better example: if someone is really beautiful, why bother to develop other qualities. For years, I've seen that "the beautiful people" -- the trendy bars near us are full of them, drinking their cosmopolitans -- get breaks that the rest of us don't. Most of the time, I envy that, but every once in a while I realize it means that they never are forced to develop any other traits or skills. After all, wine with a spectacular label may not have to taste that good, to get sales.
Of course, exceptions exist, and your mileage may vary. My wife is a 10 on all possible measures. Well, on all good measures. Not on the bad ones.
More on the taxi, and where we were headed, in my next post...
Adam