Booooooooze

[hobbes512]

For the past week, I've been staying with my family at the Moon Palace, one of those all-inclusive resorts down in Cancún. Though the trip has been pleasant, it's also been a little lackluster. I'll save the reasons why for a later entry, I think; let's just say that it is an evil, evil thing to have finals after winter break, and leave it at that for the time being.

What I'd really like to discuss here is booze. See, down here at the Moon Palace, booze is (1) legal for me to drink, and (2) included with the cost of the resort (hence the phrase "all-inclusive resort"). So I decided, "Hey, why not give it a go?"

For the record: I've rarely drunk, and those few times I have, it's pretty much exclusively been me trying a glass or wine in the context of a family dinner. Aside from wine, I think I had a shot of vodka once or twice in Russia, and a glass of Cognac at a wine and cheese party. (I know, I'm so goddamn classy, right?) My determination from those experiences has been that I don't like the taste of alcoholic drinks. However, it's a small data set, so that conclusion is the result of considerable extrapolation. And since lots of people seem to like the booze, I decided to give it the ol' college try.

That's certainly not to say I got plastered. The extent of my drinking was perhaps one or two cocktails a night, plus maybe some red wine with dinner. The point is that I had the chance to try a small-yet-reasonable sample of drinks, and managed to arrive at some better-founded conclusions concerning Alcohol and Me. The first and foremost of these is:

• I still don't really like the taste of booze.

No big surprise here: to my knowledge, alcohol is something of an acquired taste, and I simply haven't acquired it. The real question is whether I should bother to cultivate that taste, or just consider myself a teetotaler and leave it at that. I'm leaning towards the former, simply because it would be nice to be able to stomach a little drink every now and again in the company of friends. But I'm in no hurry to make a decision; I don't turn 21 till April, and even then, it's not like there's any rush to start a-drinkin'.

Anyway, a few bulleted thoughts, informed by this weeks' samplings:

• I could derive at least a little pleasure from most of the cocktails and wine I sampled. But beer tastes like piss. Or rather, it tastes very much how I imagine piss would taste, if I ever had the misfortune to drink piss from a glass. (For the record, the two brands of beer I tried were Dos Equis and Tecate Light. However, I doubt very much that I would find any other brands much of an improvement.)
• I believe I might be growing something of a taste for red wine. I was surprised to conclude after one dinner that my steak was more enjoyable with the accompanying Cabernet that it would have been otherwise. (Again with the classiness, I know!)
• I don't like gin, nor do I like tonic water. Therefore, I should not have been surprised to find that I don't like gin and tonic.
• In fact, I didn't really like any of the gin-based drinks I had. Does this mean I dislike gin? It's possible!
• I also really, really didn't like the Margarita I had.
• My favorite three drinks were: a Manhattan, a rum and Coke, and a tequila shot with a lime chaser.

So for the time being, I believe my official drink of choice will be the Manhattan. It's got a taste I can enjoy (to an extent); furthermore, I'm led to believe that it's a relatively simple, straightforward, classic drink, and that's a philosophy I can get behind. Sure, there's probably some super-sweet "girly" drink out there that would taste much better to me---but if I'm going to bother drinking booze in the future, I might as well try to be as classy as I can about it.

Okay, I've got lots of other shit to do, and I've spent altogether too much time talking about something that is relatively uninteresting. So: good night!