November 28th, 2007

Milk Subjectivity

My thwarted attempt at laziness last night was to skip the grocery store in favour of picking up expensive milk at the convenience store. Thwarted because I wound up going to *four* convenience stores looking for skim milk. Granted, I was looking for the four-litre size, due to my terror of osteoporosis, but that didn’t seem like *that* unreasonable of a request.

As I stomped about in the wind and snow (but who wears a thin jersey dress in November just because some part of her brain declared Tuesday “cute tights day”), I thought about how much I loathe milk with fat in it. Even diluted by coffee I can still feel the thickness catch in my throat. And, oh my goodness, we are embarking on the season of egg nog. It’s so…viscous. I like the *flavour* of nog–I’ll eat one of those yellow candy canes quite happily. But, ew, no, the “liquid” form is the consistency of…well. Thin milk 4-eva!

I have lived long enough to know that there is no “good” kind of milk–most people just like whatever they drank growing up and find everything else disgusting (which sucks especially for those who grew up on farms drinking unpasteurized milk, which is now illegal to sell in Ontario for reasons that…make no sense). Milk is totally subjective–and unless you drink table cream by the glass, I think it’s all pretty good for you. I think *all* the percentages should be available in stores, naturally, but I don’t really think there’s an argument available to be won.

My point, sorta, is about how I think I’m getting more mature, because I’m able to extend that sort of relativism (such a dirty word, but some things *are* relative) to things I used to be quite strident about. Fiction, for example–more and more I find myself able to recognize quality prose when I actually don’t personally enjoy it. And I’ll also *read* it, which is a big step for me. Not that I think it’s somehow virtuous of me to drag myself through tomes I hate, but there’s lots to be learned outside of the narrow spectrum of the tried and true. I get to the end and say, “Wow, that was an impressive thing to write, I could never write that. I would never want to write that, but I do wish I could do certain things that this author did.” But not out loud of course, because I’m usually reading on the bus.

Of course, there are things that are objectively bad–sour milk, prose by the light of the moon, those sorts of things. Not everything is relative.