Wine

I got 2 Groupons to buy some wine online. I dabble in wine, whereas I have a deeper investigation of beer. Beer is cheap and can be local. Wine is expensive and comes from exotic locations like Chile and California. But the Groupons gave me an entrée, ou bien, une rentrée into this lush, red-velvet world.

[The only wine worth the effort is red. I don't dislike white, but I'd rather drink beer.]

Now, after having drunk 2 bottles from this order ($25 for $75 not including shipping), I am excited - re-excited - about wine.

The first wine in this whole process was actually at a bar: a 2008 Cab from the Libery School winery in the Pablo Robles region of California. Delectable. Never mind the fact that I paid $10 for a glass and found out today that you can buy an entire bottle for as much. Such is markup in downtown upper-middle class restaurants.

Later that evening, after COT's He/She, my ladyfriend and I killed a bottle of Vinum Africa from 2007. Another Cab, this one is from, you guessed it, South Africa. See? Exotic. And really good.

Finally, for Mother's Day, I brought a bottle from my Groupon order (from Barclay's) of Roza Ridge from 2005 - another Cab. This one, from Rattlesnake Hills, WA, was also totally worth the effort and money, giving me a reason to reach for it over beer.

I cannot abide by 3-buck Chuck. Tastes like the poison alcohol pretends not to be. 3-buck chuck is about $.75 per glass, which does work out to be less than most beers. The cheapest beer I can bring myself to buy is $9 for a 6-pack, about a buck-and-a-half per bottle. This wine, at full price, is about $15, so $3.75 per glass. And you wonder why wine is so expensive by the glass!

All 3 of these wines were worth it, regardless of whatever notes of this and that try to assert themselves irrelevantly on my palate. I prefer to taste the goodness and leave the notes to the mystery. It is, after all, just grapes transformed by time.

embouteillage

Suddenly it's the morning - a grey one. I stayed in bed until I could remember a specific motivation to get up. Still working through fall-out from the wine incident, I realized that, no matter how much I pretend, I am still holding out hope for something meaningful with someone. And so I can either work to destroy that hope or work to realize it. What got me out of bed was the latter.

Blockages
So many metaphors to mix; I'm excited. The French word for traffic jam is embouteillage, which means bottleneck, but also comes from embouteiller, which is to bottle up (wine). It's come up a lot in recent conversations about creativity. You can't be recklessly creative if you're blocked up about something - it's holding you back. Several people I know are in an unproductive, uncreative holding pattern, and the cause always seems to be some sort of personal crisis getting in the way of the flow. As for me, I think I've been creative recently, but maybe there are deeper depths to explore once I unbottle some of these traffic jams.

Tension / Release
My parents were apologetic, of course, not knowing about the wine. Like I said the other day, it's not about the object, the wine, whatever. That bottle didn't really contain wine, for me, but a year's worth of waiting, hoping, and disappointment. There was tension contained within that bubbled over Sunday night. That's the problem with bottling it up, creating tension; if you're in control of its release, great, but if not, then it's painful. It's like carrying gunpowder:you can either make some great fireworks or it explodes in your face. Ultimately, there was too much tension for its own good. Whoever it was meant for would have been overwhelmed by the significance, and so would I have been. It's like when I made pineapple mango pancakes for Cory. My sister had brought them back from her honeymoon in Hawaii, and I saved them for a year or two. So then I make them for breakfast and suddenly the whole thing becomes much more intense (for me). I'm an intensity junky.

And so, in conclusion, the things we keep we keep for our emotional attachment to them. In our Materialist culture, it's our' version of karma. See, really, in the East, in many of the religions, both good karma and bad karma carry a weight; the goal is not to accrue good karma (like points in some cosmic role-playing game) but to unburden yourself of all karma. ... Now that I say that, it sounds silly to say that Eastern religions have a goal. ... Well, for we in the West, to understand, let's stick with that and move on.

symbology of mine

I should probably start with an apology to my parents, to whom I just left the most irate answering machine message - yes, old fashioned, Seinfeld-era, landline answering machine. And now the explanation.

I was in Chicago for the weekend, arriving Saturday morning to feed a friend's cat, getting back to Michigan just minutes ago - around midnight Michigan time. Over the weekend, I went to a fun pot luck and the Symphony Saturday night, another symphony concert on Sunday, taught two piano lessons and had dinner that night with my good friend Laura. Leaving dinner on Sunday was difficult, but I couldn't figure out why. Once in the car, I realized that I wasn't quite ready to be alone for the week and started to feel lonely. But I also felt motivated and excited about the things that I could do this week. Last week really felt like work; this week is more open, so I can do more fun things that motivate me.

I'm planning on starting my orchestra piece - at least the research for it - this week. I got inspired by going to the Symphony twice, paying close attention to the string writing. Writing for winds is easy; brass, less so; strings even less. It's just harder to write "idiomatically" for them. Just like writing at the piano produces certain results, you don't want to just write piano music for strings. There's much more flexibility with dynamics, for instance, since you can have them sustain a note (forever) and then crescendo or decrescendo. There's also the issue of the bow and its direction: how many notes do you give them per bow? and so on.

And so when I got back to Michigan, feeling conflicted and confused but ultimately optimistic, I noticed that my parents had opened a bottle of my wine over the weekend. Ostensibly, no big deal. Ostensibly, it's just a thing, an object, practically immaterial. But in this case, it had become even larger as a symbol than as an object. This particular bottle, I had bought in Paris over a year ago and had been saving it for a special occasion. Somehow, there haven't been any - none that I've deemed worthy. Schade. So the bottle became an even larger symbol - one of the noticeable lack of special occasions. Which I find terribly depressing. And so now I'm finishing it off. And, you know what? It's not amazing. Pretty good, but I'd give it a B. The build up, the anticipation, the idea of the wine had gotten larger than its actual quality. Then again, for the 25 or so Euro I paid for it, I would have expected more. Either way, it's over, and in a way, I'm glad that I don't have this burden any more, this reminder of lack. It's become just the latest thing in a string of stuff - objects, facebook friends, whatever - that I've discarded (with or against my will) to lighten the load I carry.

So now the two original opposing emotions - that my optimism (naive idealism) had managed to subsume - have spawned a litter of half breeds running amok. I think there's a sailor's saying like: sad and lonely at night nothing to fright; sad and lonely in morning, friends and family take warning.