This Is How We Do It

When pleasure isn’t incidental, it’s the point.

The metaphor:

This is my 16th weekly post, which feels like a nice, legitimate number!

When I started posting essays, I knew the type of feeling I wanted to write about, but couldn’t describe it directly, just that it’s often conveyed by metaphor. We grasp for parallels when something is hard to explain head-on. It’s that grasping feeling itself, the what-is-this-feeling feeling, that I wanted to explore.

I do like a good metaphor, but I’m more interested in what’s behind them, in the effort to try and capture the frequent surprises involved in being a person in the world. From the simple to the profound, from the vibrantly beautiful to the crushingly lonely, there are so many moments that feel unexpected to me. I love swapping these stories together, both when there’s overlap in our experiences and when there isn’t: there’s wonder in both the solidarity and the separateness.

Giving myself the structure of a weekly assignment has been a fun new way to capture these moments more regularly and to realize that there are even more than I’d thought. Hearing back from you all about what resonates or what’s different for you has been a true delight, too, well worth the bizarre vulnerability of voluntarily describing my feelings on the internet, at least so far. I like collecting feelings the way entomologists collect bugs: I try to catch them and look at them from every angle, then label and display them. Look, it’s a schadenfreude, rarely seen in the wild! And here’s a childish delight, they often migrate through this area in spring!

This week, I wanted to follow up on a feeling that brushed by me in a Brooklyn walkup this past fall. Thanks for joining me on the journey to pin it down.

The story:

“Can I offer you white wine?”

It was a recent Saturday and I was back in New York City. I was in a friend’s plant-filled apartment, at a table covered in bowls of olives, spreads, and veggies. She was standing at the fridge, looking back at me, and I grinned.

“I mean…sure! What are you having?”

She turned to face me, looking abashed. “That’s sort of the question! I recently stopped liking chardonnay, and that’s been my go-to for so long that I don’t know what to get instead.”

I was very psyched to hear this, for two reasons. One is that I like pretty much any white wine except chardonnay, including the dry riesling she brought to the table. The other was relief that I wasn’t alone in still figuring out my preferences.

I told her that I’d recently completed a similar quest to figure out what kind of milk I like in coffee drinks. I felt silly not knowing this basic aspect of my own taste in my late 30s, but there I was. I’d avoided coffee in my 20s and only in the past five or so years started to drink it recreationally, a mocha or chai latte every few months. The point of ordering it was to have a treat, so I wanted to know which of the ever-expanding milk options I liked best. Still, I didn’t want to order every option to compare side by side, like Julia Roberts trying all the egg dishes in Runaway Bride, so I wasn’t sure how to figure it out.

Then last March, a friend and I both ordered chai lattes, hers with oat milk and mine with whole. Mine was delicious, but hers was even more so, with the added golden, nutty flavor. This preference clicked into place in some internal puzzle where its presence was met as warmly as its absence had been missed. Ever since then, when I order oat milk, I feel more than content: I feel a little cocky. I feel like the astronauts in Armageddon, walking in slo-mo towards my heroic flight. I feel like Montell Jordan, bragging that “South Central does it like nobody does.” And it’s not like I’ve saved anyone else with my oat milk or like I think my (very basic!) order is unique. It’s the satisfaction of knowing exactly what I like – or back to Montell, that this is how we do it.

This is the upside, the joy of discovery. The thrill of hearing a song that hits me just right, where the verse is so good that I feel suspense about whether the chorus will deliver, and then it does. The satisfaction of hearing a joke that strikes my sense-of-humor bullseye, like the one about the non-binary prospector: there’s gold in them/their hills! Even the amazement of seeing a movie trailer that’s targeted at right me, as if Olivia Wilde made Booksmart as a really thoughtful personal gift. Each of these experiences is like the sympathetic resonance that happens in stringed instruments, where a note played on one string makes another string vibrate, on the same instrument or a totally separate one, as if too excited to contain that they, too, can make that noise.

But my friend wasn’t at this part of the journey, the joy of discovery. She was at the opposite end, the angst of searching. The downside of how good this resonance feels, when an external item meets your taste, is that the lack of it leaves an ache. There’s a reason Runaway Bride uses knowing what eggs she likes as a stand-in for Julia Roberts’ whole personality.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the angst of searching, but I’d conflated it with growing up: figuring out how to style my clothes and hair, choose and treat my friends, use time and make money. I’ve written here about navigating a lack of structure in times of transition, as well how my assumptions about what I’ll like have held me back from finding it. But I hadn’t registered this simpler reason to find yourself back at square one: taste can change over time.

I knew, of course, that I’d grown from drinking Hefeweissen and Andre to NEIPA and Pet Nat, but I’d thought that was part of maturing – and now I’d arrived at “mature.” I didn’t know it was an ongoing cycle, that the solid ground I’d found would fall away again as time keeps passing. I suppose there’s an aspect of searching for my own shifting taste, and hopefully discovering it with joy, that’s developmentally appropriate at every stage to come.

There are some searches that are not about taste. I’m happy to have Wirecutter just tell me what office chair to buy: there’s no joy in sitting in all the options myself. And there are decisions that are too important to reduce to the idea of taste, the foundation and pillars of planning a life. But I love knowing that I like tall slippers that keep my whole ankle warm, I like cheddar cheese aged so that each bite contains crunchy little crystals, I like stringing up twinkly lights to shine in the dark. I spent years insisting I didn’t need little niceties like this, wanting to keep my life cheap and simple, but it didn’t make me easy-going to deny myself pleasure.

Maybe knowing how to find ourselves in coffee drinks, or wine varieties, or I don’t know, hot baths and fresh grass, helps build the muscle or momentum we need to make those big choices. Maybe we need to know how it feels when something clicks in just right so we can find our way forward, again and again, through the bigger changes. For me, it’s been a journey to shift my sense of life from something to be endured or defeated to something to be enjoyed. So whenever I can, I’ll ask for it with oat milk.

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