2024-10-13
Another wv! My, this is absurd. I actually don't know whether I should be writing wv at all, let alone three in a day, and it really goes to show how much I am staying in the hotel today... Too long. FWIW, it is half eight - I went out for an hour and a half to eat dinner and listen to some music in Pizza del Nettuno.
I was offered today wine at the restaurant I ate at, and declined and just asked for water (acqua - see, I can speak Italian! well, I actually said 'just water please', ma comunque...) instead. The thing is, I do actually want to be able to drink wine and enjoy it, because there are also many enotecas about which it would be nice to go to. Instead, I can't really go to an enoteca, and actually do feel a little as if I am "outcast" somehow for my not drinking or liking wine. In fact, I had the same feeling about beer when I was younger, although that is somewhat alleviated now that I have developed a taste for cider. Wine is one of those things that clearly people do enjoy, but I do not have the taste developed for it - potentially as I tasted wine when I was young and did not like it, and have avoided it as an adult also.
I am thinking though about olives. I used to dislike olives. When I stayed at Hope, I was forced to eat olives everyday, as there was only one pub, and that one pub had five meals, only one of which was vegetarian. As a result, I ate linguini with olives every day for a week. I (and my friend) were actually so regular with our meals that after day three the staff just knew what we wanted immediately - I had Old Mout cider (I did try different flavours each time) and a linguini and my friend had a burger and I believe a coke (may be wrong).
Now, after that week I hadn't really developed a taste for olives moreso than I had just overcome my aversion to them. I still to this day do not necessarily like olives when served just as-is, but do enjoy them in meals. To give proof of that, both my breakfast and lunch today contained olives and they were greatly enjoyed.
And so, I am thinking about wine, it being of course a staple here in Italy, and also back in the UK - well, actually, everywhere. When I go out for drinks, often I, because I like neither wine nor beer, have to not get the drinks that were already ordered for the group but instead get my own drink, namely a cider (or water if I am not drinking). In a way, it would be good to get rid of that, but also to be able to have the experience of trying different wines and seeing how they are - not that I will be a wine snob, but it would be good to be able to partake, I mean.
And so, it is about acclimatisation, is what the olive story was about. If I want to be able to drink wine, I must drink wine. In fact, a lot of things are like that I notice. That is the reason for my /thousands page: I want to have a way to track nothing extraneous except "do I do the thing". The key metric seems to be, for all things, "do I do the thing, and if so, how much?" If I can answer that with, "yes I do the thing, everyday, for two years now" then I've made good progress. If I answer "well, I do the thing, but only infrequently" then I have not. There are also gradations of how easy a thing is to do, and how often it needs be done. For instance, the gym needs be done thrice weekly or a bit more, and involves a decent cost (an hour and a half of my time). A press-up involves barely any time and has little involved cost. As a result, getting to 1,000 would be incredibly easy to do. Drawing involves a bit of an expense in terms of time, but I could still get to 1,000 without all too much effort after a few years, or a year if I draw enough.
(Perhaps I could have a section on my /thousands for drinking a thousand glasses of wine :P)
So, I think for the rest of this holiday, I might try wine. Just one glass at each place, and I'll buy water as well to choke it down with if I don't like it. Hopefully by the end of it I will have built up a bit of a taste?
I'm not going to drag this one out to 1,000 words. Have a good one.