Grievance #8: You Always Had More of a Taste for It Than Me (We Are Senseless, Pt. 2)
This one actually is going to tap into some cultural considerations and decision-making mechanisms that won't be fully discussed, here. If they were, this would be the length of a fucking book, as opposed to several small introductions to the rage that everyone's been trying to force as clearly part of my character. Looks like you got your wish, people: I hope that I'm conveniently 2-dimensional enough for you, now.
Anyway, it becomes apparent after the holiday season (otherwise known as the season of eating that separates most people from the Diabetics from those with Diabetes Type I and Diabetes Type II) that people's tastes are not exactly that unified. In spite of the Food Network, Bravo, and the like, we aren't all eating brilliantly decadent meals that manage to include every food group and keep a smile plastered to our faces 24/7 (although Alton Brown rules). That's hardly a surprising lack of development, considering that we are completely mismanaging our own metabolisms just by the way we consume food, so that we are constantly reacting, rather than thinking calmly, about how to eat in general. Now, there's also a clear barrier to most of the previously mentioned recommendations from ever making it through to actually becoming staples of our diets. Next thing we know, we're wrinkled, old, can barely taste anything, and are shoving 20 pills down our gullet with our pathetic excuse for a breakfast (if we're lucky, we've not in retirement homes and have splurged on what the saucy young brunette on the television told us to get for breakfast, like Special K or whatever-the-hell will be the splendid breakfast recommendation, by then), because half of our organs are functioning at less than half of their previous efficiencies.
But, about that barrier: How something tastes, to you. Y'know, those of you who have severely hampered your sense of taste by repeatedly beating up your ability to smell, which is highly entwined with your sense of taste (and you don't need to have a cold to know that much [although having had one certainly helps slam the point home, so reach back to that]) by smoking. In spite of this, there's frequently a disinterest in sucking that up and eating some of the vegetables quite likely to assist in guarding against some of the damage coming from smoking and basically just about everything else, considering how many cancer types there are in existence.
I live in a universe where an absurdly high number of people that I know who are self-proclaimed vegetarians to some extent won't eat one or another vegetable that I, as a supposedly Universe-Hating Omnivore (oh, the nerve of him for even typing, now!) happily chomp and/or drink (¿organic juices? ¡Yes, ma'am!) up. My example that is the most blatant would be the carrot. Yes, you're probably covered for most of your daily intake with a multivitamin, but how often are you honestly taking the blasted things? Even I will admit to being kind of forgetful and infrequent with said pills even now, as I slowly transition to (trying to get rid of some of my old bullet-sized stock of non-) chewable vitamins. In any case, getting the nutrients through ingestion is much more recommended in the first place. So, maybe now's not the time to have a dislike of something fairly major and identifiable for the label that you've affixed to yourself, ¿hrm? Being 12 about the eating preferences made more sense when you were, say, twelve, and your Mum was around to make sure that you survived long enough to maybe grow tall, bitter, and passed up for people who primarily eat beef, whose colons have several feet of unprocessed matter to prove it, washed down with copious amounts of horrible-tasting light beer that they clearly didn't have any problem getting a taste for, despite obviously not having a taste for it before.
But no... we've got to bow to your subjective sense of what you can accept eating, without you developing any new tastes until you die, to hear how we're told this matter. We even bandy about such concepts as having good taste, as if this is supposed to mean that someone has made all of the right choices, rather than the condition of having experienced a wide breadth of variants for the sensation, and thusly are capable of making an excellent judgment upon the basis of this worldly knowledge. I'm incredibly sorry that you never "had a taste for it," whatever it might be in presentation to you, ¿but what are you intending on doing, now that you have so clearly defined all of your parameters, whether literal taste (eating) or figurative (culture, communication [physical and verbal], arts, beliefs, etc.)?
¿Are we to believe that the entire extent of the human experience is merely the nailing down of the proper subjective views for you to take? I am accused with labored repetition of being arrogant and judgmental, and yet many of my detractors are guilty of the same on a much more covert level, a much more socially acceptable way of rejecting various aspects of the world. I am not even going to suggest that we can't have our own subjective judgments of the world, not at all (I may be a jerk, but I am not a tyrant, per se). I am just suggesting that I find myself a little skeptical of people wanting to be close to others, to have friends who might not be identical to them, when such things are closed off due to a lack of even attempting to reconcile differences. That's just the thing: I know that many of us are different in our tastes, and I DO find that glorious, as I suggest frequently in my writings less overtly, alternating with great spouts of fervor as I attempt to bludgeon home the idea on a more blatant level (I have problems, and I slowly am solving the ones that are a hindrance). However, the only thing that ever matters to me is the why, not just for me to know, but for both of us to know: That kind of understanding allows for an appreciation to blossom, amidst it all. Or, I suppose, I could just be told that ______ is vile and shall always be that way.
Anyway, thank you Mum, for understanding that I needed some time to come around to liking a lot of vegetables and various things that are good for me, along with giving me an open mind to apply my analytical razors to, in regards to art, let alone the world. I am, however, profusely apologetic for all of the stubbornness (also heavily drawn from both her and my Father, responsible for many of the razors of logic being referenced) that now torments her, in regards to my broad taste(s) (note the clarification of how the word is being utilized) and how I won't let her just settle like the wide swath of people that I am pointing my psychological finger at(I am guilty of the problem too, at times). However, I do consider it absolutely the least that I can do, in regards to repaying all of her patience with me over the years.
It will be several more years before I catch up, but I'm apparently not as good at the role, so I might have to go at it a bit longer. One might say I've gotten a taste for such mild struggles.