Alcohol: an acquired taste?
People often assume that I don’t drink for religious reasons. That is not true. I have no problems with casual drinking and having a good time. The reason I don’t drink is because I can’t seem to acquire the taste for it. It just tastes…gross. Believe me, I’ve tried, but I still can’t manage to transform the experience into an enjoyable one. The taste of alcohol just keeps me from wanting any more. This prefaces what happened yesterday at my lab meeting:
My colleagues, B. and S. were in charge of food/drink purchases for the previous lab meeting. It didn’t occur to them to purchase any non-alcoholic drinks, and were admonished by my advisor, R. (who, by the way, likes to drink). R. took it upon himself to buy drinks for this lab meeting, including non-alcoholic ones so as not to leave people out. A girl from another lab, A., having learned of the situation, proclaimed her shock and disbelief that someone would actually turn down an alcoholic drink. All this happened, of course, as I was sitting in my office, just within earshot.
Some more conversation ensued, which I lost track of because I was working. Big mistake. It just so happened that R. stepped into the lab, ready to start the meeting. A. questioned R. why anyone in the lab would turn down alcohol. Stupid me, I chose to step out of the office at that exact moment:
A: Who in here does not drink alcohol?
R (seeing that I just stepped out of my office, motioned towards me): David doesn’t drink, right?
Me: Um…no…not really.
(awkward silence)
You should see the look on A.’s face. I’m not sure whether it was a look of pity or confusion. Or maybe she was thinking: freak. I think it was more confusion:
A: Oh…we can get you some tap water. We can makel taste good…
Tap water? No thanks, I brought my own filtered water.
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My experience has been that in most scenarios people serve crappy alcohol. I never liked alcohol in college because parties served the cheap, badly tasting beer—that’s what college kids could afford. I would imagine that at a lab people will not buy good quality alcohol either because it’s not in a person’s priorities to buy good alcohol to donate to a lab party and you do have to pay a bit more for the good stuff so it may be beyond someone’s budget.
And that’s why I have a total of five drinks in a year. But they’re really good drinks. You had good wine at your wedding.
Yeah, I figured the alcohol wasn’t of the best quality. I think I’ve had very few drinks where I actually found it tasty. I’m glad you liked the wine at the wedding =) Too bad I didn’t have the time to eat or drink much…
I agree that most times people give out the shitty low end drinks. Of course, it’s hard to buy alcohol when you don’t think you’ll like it, no less, the expensive stuff. I would say though, wait until you have a really stressful job that makes you want to kill yourself. Then, as enablingfiction found out, you will want to drink to drown out the pain.
I think I turn to watching TV and reading random webpages on the internet.
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