Things That Matter To People Who Matter

Cheese; The Swimmers; The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Italian Men

	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Mar 20, 2007

Since giving up drinking milk in exchange for wine with dinner, I have found my new source of calcium. Cheese, I've found, goes well with wine and makes a great segue into dinner. (If you want to be really European, you have it after dinner.) My first encounter with cheese started with cheddar and Muenster — basically anything that was prepackaged and shrink-wrapped. Now, I'm eating cheeses from goats, cheeses from sheep — there are cheeses out there that are hand-rubbed with white wine and aged two years. You can't go wrong with anything that is hand-rubbed.

If you are like most people during the depressing winter months, all the annoying "hump day" comments in the world will not make you feel better. That is, until this past February, when Wednesday became "Swimmers at the Khyber Day"! Evenings normally spent wrapped in a blanket in front of your only working heat vent magically transformed into good friends and Yards with a cozy and upbeat atmosphere supplied by my pals Krista, Steve, Rick and Scott. Each week, this attractive foursome took us miles from our fears with their soothing melodies, empowering us all to act like Friday night — until Thursday morning. I'm sorry that their Khyber residency has ended. What will I do this Wednesday?

Full of wonderful digressions into the repository of God's bowels and the impossibility of any real assurance in life, this is a beautiful book. Milan Kundera's novel is like eye/brain chocolate that's so good you have to eat the whole box all at once. The grand idea that the lack of importance, the lack of meaning, the lack of weight — and not the several tons of heavy, heady and dreadfully human preoccupations we have every day — is the hardest and most unbearable part of life, is curiously both liberating and terrifying. Like having all your fingers run off at the same time to go start their own insignificant little lives.

Italian Men

In an attempt to learn Italian while living in Rome, I dated Italian men and developed the following highly scientific theory: Italian men love women and tolerate sex to get them, whereas American men love sex and tolerate women to get some. The consequences are profound. An 89-year-old Italian female with warts is flirted with and feels beautiful, whereas in the U.S., women over the age of 50 are invisible. Lest you're not convinced that the Italian stallion who ravishes you with his eyes is not also intent on jumping your bones, consider that Italy has around a 1 percent birthrate. The recent Vatican-approved book It's A Sin Not To Do It urges Catholics to do "it" more often. Clearly, the pope supports my theory.

 

Genre-Bender
National Treasure
Rediscovered Country
Loose Change
Nice Pickup
Now See This
Chekhov Lizardbrain
Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Norman Mailer