Cigarettes and chocolate milk

10 juicy points to anyone who can identify the subject.

Today was, in some sense, productive. I woke up at 8:30 to go exercise with Umesh and Jean at the RSF and ran back at 10:30 just in time to take a shower, grab Kris, and head over to Union Square for San Francisco’s 2003 Dine-About-Town kickoff event with fellow LJers jcliao, wittlebc, yayu, and others.

The premise is that you pay an entrance fee of $10 that goes to charity, and the chefs of all these ass-expensive restaurants prepare hors d’oeuvres for you to eat, perhaps in an attempt to get you to actually come to their restaurants and shell out some real bucks. The event was terribly organized and they ran out of food about half way through. However, to my surprise, the stuff I did manage to try was delicious, proving that my tastes aren’t as pedestrian as I had hoped. Who knew expensive food could be so good?

See, gdogg and I have long held the theory that the worse your tastes — the less discriminating you are — the better off you’ll be. Yes, you don’t appreciate “the finer things in life”; you appreciate everything in life. For instance, Grant is an ice cream connoisseur, whereas I’m not. So he’s only happy if we get the right kind of ice cream, while I’m thrilled to scarf anything down. Conversely, I’m annoyed by low-fidelity stereo systems, while he doesn’t care, so I end up spending hundreds of bucks more than he just to be satisfied. In each case, the person who has uncultivated tastes has a better time all around. Moral of the story: lowbrow is cool.

So, yeah, expensive food is good. Luckily, I also love Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and most other trashy fast-food places too, so I’m not too worried ;).

I’m going to indulge here. Yes, it’s my second entry, and I’m already being self-indulgent. Sick, really. Anyway… I love going to concerts. In my previous web log, I made a habit of annotating each entry with the concerts I had attended during that time period, and I’ve found it fun to glance back and remember particular shows. Too bad I didn’t write anything all of last semester. I was planning on fixing that right here, but honestly now that I’m writing this, I’m way too lazy to review each show. A simple list will have to suffice: Ani DiFranco, Joshua Redman, Ben Folds/Duncan Sheik (not as good as this past summer’s Ben show), The Strokes (horrendous), Paul Dempsey, The Music (awesome, one of the best this year), Luna/Goldenboy, Counting Crows/Toad the Wet Sprocket (new albums is great, and Toad was impressive too).

Shows I wanted to attend but couldn’t: Sigur Ros (Svefn-g-englar is arguably the most gorgeous ten minutes of music ever composed; new album is sluggish but growing on me), Tori Amos (Scarlet’s Walk is fantastic), and the killer, The Flaming Lips/Beck (who put out two of the most brilliant releases of the year — argh!).

</indulgence>