At Bryan and Cat's place the other night, I tried wine yet again. This time it was only half terrible — I'm experiencing the same thing that happened with Guinness, where I find myself kind of wanting wine yet still remembering how terrible it tastes. I think that, just like Guinness, what I'm drawn to is more the activities that I associate with the drink — the theatrics of carefully pouring a pint of Guinness and enjoying the creamy head, or the relaxing experience of enjoying a glass of wine and good cheese in a pool with friends. Still, for whatever reason, I find myself slowly (and painfully) acquiring a taste for these things that taste so terrible at first.

I've never understood the concept of 'acquired taste,' and why people pursue it. Your sense of taste is one of your body's primary ways of determining whether ingesting something is going to raise or lower your chances of survival. It's a sense evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Rats have an even more acute sense of taste than humans, because they don't have the ability to vomit, so they need to be doubly careful to avoid ingesting anything harmful.

This is a useful tool. And yet we try so enthusiastically to subvert it, forcing unpleasant (and, in fact, harmful) things past it until our body finally grudgingly accommodates it, like the bound feet of Chinese servant girls. It doesn't really strike me as a desirable goal.

And yet I continue trying wine and beer, hoping to finally be able to enjoy a glass socially with friends. Sometimes you've got to tighten the corset if you want to get the man.