Five Words Meme: Tealfox Edition

[jakebe]

Vest
If I could get away with it, I'd wear trousers and vests with long, buttoned-up shirts whenever possible. It's hard to explain why I find vests so aesthetically pleasing; I think they're simply a trigger for a particular state of mind. Like a superhero with a cape, a guy wearing a vest just immediately strikes me as a fellow with strong moral fiber, reasonable, upstanding and all-around neat. Of course, this is a total fallacy. But few things strike me as more handsome than a good vest and a pocketwatch. As odd as it may be for me to say, they're a great expression of masculinity in clothing.

Mythology
I've been fascinated by the idea of mythology for a long time, though I would hardly consider myself a scholar. In fact, I know laughably little about the *actual* myths from various cultures around the world. The fact that so many ancient (and modern) cultures have turned to myth again and again to make sense of their world, though, is wonderful and intriguing. We do it even now, and part of the fun of following pop culture is to see what sticks around to become our myths, and how our application of myth has changed to fit our modern and postmodern sensibilities. We don't need myth to make sense of the world in quite the same way we did before, but we still do it to reaffirm ideals we believe in. The best part is the accessibility of myths from so *many* cultures; we can take them and reshape them, mash them together to make our own myths that are deeply personal, or that fill a very specific niche.

Wine
The more I learn about wine, the more relaxed I get about it. When I first started getting into it, I thought that there was some kind of craft to it, that there was some objective reality surrounding the quality of the wine. Now I know that's a load of horse-shit. :D A great wine is *highly* subjective; you like what you like, and if someone tells you it's 'bad' or 'wrong,' give them a kick in the nuts.

What makes wine so interesting and so worth following is the seemingly endless array of factors that go into its production. Placement of the grapevine, soil composition, sunlight, rain, pollution all play their parts, but so does the specific mixes of grapes, how they're crushed and processed, how they're aged, where they're stored and what in. There are so *many* moving parts, and they all matter to the final outcome. A trained palate can help you distinguish those factors and even tell you the story of the grape, and that's an incredible talent to me. Being able to tell, just by tasting, where a wine comes from and the likely conditions the grape grew in and how you know that? Awesome. Once you get to that level, each bottle of wine becomes an exploration of this entire landscape. That's amazing to me. I'm nowhere near there yet, but maybe someday I'll get close anyway.

Enthusiasm
Enthusiasm is one of those things I always have a difficult time with. I always tend to latch onto strange things for strange reasons, and explaining the whys and wherefores of my excitement just takes a long time, and it's quite possible people wouldn't even get it anyway. I'm never quite sure what's an appropriate expression of enthusiasm, so I tend to play it safe and stoically. Now that I'm on a bit of an even keel, I'm trying to be more open with things that are exciting to me, but there's still a lot of apprehension there.

In others, people are never at their most attractive as when they're unabashedly excited about something. I *love* watching someone geek out about something they're into, to the point where there's just no ego involved. They become love for their thing, pure and simple. I never get tired of watching that.

Creativity
This is one of those traits I admire highly, and it's one of the big reasons I consider myself as lucky as I do. I'm friends with a ton of very creative people and it makes for a very encouraging environment in which to be creative yourself. It's amazing to me, the things that people come up with on their own, and there's almost nothing better than a group of people who inspire each other, who push and challenge and support. It's a beautiful thing.

Anyway, creativity is one of those things that I struggle to find a proper way to express. I see myself as a pretty creative person, but I don't have the discipline or the craft to properly do anything with it. That's the thing that I really hope to change.