we are total trendsetters

Thanks to my good buddy, Sarah Sherman, for sending this my way. Bourbon and Brine, baby.

anticipation

Just last week, we had some of the first days of real spring. In the evening, I could kick-back with my feet up on the porch, sipping a tasty brew. Fat Tire's malty, caramelly goodness sits well with the shitty-pretty view from the deck of alleyways and, if you look hard to the left, the whatcha-talkin-'bout-Willis tower. On the porch, my mind and mouth are free to wonder beyond the sometimes strangling realm of social policy.

Once I finish school, I swear I won't spend all my time relaxing on the porch singing the praises familiar beers and letting my mind get flabby. Nay! I will challenge myself with the discipline of continuing education. I will learn about bitters and vermouths and liqueurs. Like a fool, I have overlooked these quiet sidekicks of classic cocktails. I too firmly fawned over the seeming heroes of these drinks - your whiskeys and gins. Yes, these get you drunk but that's reductive. What makes classics classic are the roundness and depths of these pack-a-punch drinks. Thank you, Longman and Eagle, for reminding me and letting me revel in your Vieux Carré, an earthy mix of Old Overholt rye, punt e mes, Landy cognac, Bénédictine, and aromatic bitters.

ontological security

"If some ritual - the ceremony of tea among the English for example - is an exact repetition of that which I observed yesterday and I shall observe again tomorrow, then the present moment is the past brought to life again, the future anticipated."
-- Simone de Beauvoir

Spring Break '010 USA!!!!

Spring Break elicits a certain silly joy in me. Thinking about it makes me giddy - actually giddy. I think part of that is because of what it is not. Spring Break is not the school or work that harshly demarcate its boundaries. It is not the claustrophobia of winter nor spontaneity's summer. It is not a given, and I will not let 'em take it away.

Drinking Bicardi Raz and watching Finding Nemo on the big screen is not the same as being at the beach.

Drinking a cup of Metropolis's coffee as big as your head and chasing it with a vegan scone does not make you a savvy, self-deprecating intellectual. (though you will think very very fast.)

Drinking a shot of whiskey followed by a shot of pickle juice does not make you vomit.

What was not was amazing. Unlikely and likely combinations erupt in a thousand little bubbles of joy.

i probably should have known about this earlier

Chicago Bar Project. I should probably be a stringer for this.

i can sympathize

Walking to class today (in the second-to-last week of my second-to-last quarter), I saw the remnants of someone's private moment. On the sidewalk side-by-side sat a 22 of Old English and a pint of Ben and Jerry's chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. Clearly, this raises a number of questions. Ruminate accordingly.

kindred

Two sets of dear friends visited in January. Visited Chicago in January. Clearly, I am loved.

Eben and I are truly at our best together on a porch, beers in hand, music playing, and time stopped or spread. Alas, the Adirondack chairs are yet to be purchased and snow's all that sittin on the porch. So when Eben and Anna visited, I had to plan some indoor activities. Many of them involved beer including a tour of Half Acre Brewery.

Half Acre's brewery tour was free yet they still pumped us full of free beer. Amazing, tasty, complex free beers. The kind of beers that you wouldn't want to have as an everyday beer but you would because the Half Acre folks are so knowledgeable and charming. The beautiful foamy head on this hoppy afternoon was that Half Acre doesn't want to expand. They don't want to get big. They don't want you to drink their beer everyday. Hallelujah.