I wear my heart on my sleeve–if you know me, you know this. And the past few weeks my heart has been tied closely to the fortunes of Pittsburgh’s hockey team. It cheered me up a bit when this morning I got this “sympathy card” from two of my friends from work:
In inter-office mail no less. And, the card was from the batch of miscellaneous greeting cards that sit behind my cubicle. Bri came down this morning to look through the cards (as she does every so often) and asks, “Jon Dodd, are there any sympathy cards here?” Another thing that’s always been true about me: I have ridiculous/awesome friends.
Let’s see, also, today at work we had a Root Beer Tasting–and yes, that’s what you think it is. Over our lunchbreak me and 15 other co-workers sampled a dozen-and-a-half root beers, from diet to generic to craft-brewed. It seems I have the palate of the masses, as my top three root beers were also the consensus top three: Jackson Hole’s “Buckin’ Root Beer” and a couple of names you might recognize, Mug and Shasta (yup, I was shocked, too). Mug was actually my favorite–scored so for its nice blend of sweetness and rootness.
And I have a new theory about my scores lining up exactly with the winning point-getters (we assigned point values to every root beer and came up with a consensus top three), and how this might relate to the inner struggle I had a few months ago when I first discovered Stuff White People Like. All of the sudden there was this list in front of me that chronicled many of the things I do indeed like. I felt exposed. I felt embarrassed. But most of all (and worst of all for white people), I felt wildly un-original.
Today, though, I wonder if instead of me being the ultimate conformist (as I believed/feared after seeing certain aspects of myself chronicled at SWPL–”but to take it to the pinnacle of whiteness, you need to put the Apple sticker in the rear window of your Prius, Jetta, BMW, Subaru 4WD Station Wagon or Audi”–I’m not kidding when I say this rocked me to the core), I’m just amazingly normal. Average. Typical. And yes, perhaps this = boring.
Maybe I’m just the kind of guy who knows what root beer people like, not because they like it, but because I like it. Blind taste test like it. Anyway, this is all a bit of silliness ignoring a much larger, deeper and broader discussion which I hope we can have sometime–but not tonight. I’ve got another day of work in the morning (which means I need to get to sleep)–doubtful it’ll be as ridiculous as today’s.
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