One Plus One Is One

Originally I had plans to go buy and drink some nice wine with my friend Meredyth last night, but she cancelled, which was both lame and not at all surprising. Instead, I ended up going out to dinner and then ice cream with Emily, which was really fun. It was the second time I've seen her since we stopped dating a few months ago; the first was at Fermata show at the King Club, which was horrible and awkward (the interaction, not the show), but now I think we're ready to be friends again. I'm happy about that.

Our conversation drifted to politics a lot, and I mentioned that I've long had the suspicion that eventually, there would come a time when I would either have to go into politics and try to do something for this country, or move away. To Ireland, maybe, or New Zealand. Someplace more civilized. It seems now that every few months, something happens that makes me think that time is going to come sooner rather than later.

For example: apparently the NSA can summarily halt any investiation into their own activities by simply denying the required security clearance to anyone who wants to investigate. This strikes me as very Wrong and very Un-American, but what really boils my blood is that nobody seems to care anymore. The Washington Post reports that something like two thirds of the country is perfectly fine with being spied on, tracked and controlled by Big Brother, as long as he mumbles something vague about security while he does it. Two thirds! What's WRONG with you people!? Even the conservatives ought to be up in arms over this stuff; weren't you guys all about small government? Or does that not apply when you're in charge of every branch of it? Bloody hypocrites.

Tonight I went to a wine tasting at Barrique's with a few friends, and amidst the requisite mockery of ourselves pretending to be wine snobs, I think we all had a good time. We had tastes of two Sauvignon Blancs, two Merlots, three Cabernets and a Sirah. I had never been to a wine tasting before; it was very different to have a half glass of several different wines back to back, rather than having several glasses from one bottle before starting another. I enjoyed being able to compare them more directly.

I bought a bottle of the second one and got to chat with the hostess about wines for awhile, which got me thinking about the differences between the art of light and sound as opposed to taste and smell. The former are continuous physical phenomena that we can model, analyze and reproduce mathematically, while the latter are combinations of discrete objects that we can't easily model or predict. We know every frequency of light that our eyes can detect and we can produce them at will, so the challenge of visual art isn't to discover new colors, but to come up with novel and inspiring patterns of the same colors. Taste, on the other hand, is something else; there is no complete inventory of molecules that stimulate our tongues in any particular way, and we can't easily produce a specific taste if we haven't already discovered it. The art of taste is therefore more arcane, somehow; more at the mercy of trial and error, history and experimentation.

I'm working on a mix cd to bring Anna when I go to visit her in Paris next week. There is entirely too much music that needs to be included. Oh, the struggles of a hard life.

In the past few days I've been assembling my thoughts for a good ol' political tirade. You've been warned...