Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Tonight, to honor the culinary skills I’ve acquired from life’s long journey, I made a complicated, hasty, delicious dinner: Italian pasta & sauce with Chinese shrimp stir-fry and American salad and biscuits, and French white wine. Not bad for a single guy in his early 20s:

It was delicious. I wish you (you know who you are) could have been with me.

It should be Remy Martin but I don’t like putting accents in post titles. That aside, Remy Martin’s a high-class drink made from double-distilled fine champagne. After distillation, the brandy is aged at least 2.5 years in oak barrels. The grapes used are also strictly regulated–90 percent must be Ugni Blanc, Folle Blanche, or Colombard grapes.

There are three kinds of Cognac you can buy, sorted by quality:

• VS (Very Special) - stored for at least two years in casks
• VSOP (Very Superior Old Pale) - stored for at least four years in casks
• XO (Extra Old) - stored for at least six years in casks

Interestingly, 60-80% of the American cognac market is African American, because of its recent placement in hip-hop and rap music as Yak or Yack. According to BoingBoing:

“Cognac “is a classy, sophisticated and really smooth thing to drink,” says rap star Jay-Z. His new Manhattan club, 40/40, features a “Remy room” in honor of his own favorite cognac brand, Remy Martin. He says he likes to sip Remy Martin’s Louis XIII — which comes in a gold-encrusted Baccarat crystal bottle for $5,000 — “whenever I wanna have a really relaxing moment, usually with a cigar.”

It’s a bit expensive–at $135 a bottle, $35 a glass–but it’s definitely worth it if you want to relax. Next to try: Hennessy VSOP.

I went out with some friends to a bar near k-town that seemed heavily frequented by Koreans. My friends were quickly intoxicated by a lemon drop, margarita, water, and a glass of red wine, but my shot of patron silver and riesling didn’t go far enough since I’d just eaten dinner.

It’s not often that I write about my personal life on this blog, but my actions and this experience are incomprehensible even to me. Perhaps my readers will find something in the telling of the story.

My friends and I had a good time chatting away mindlessly until it was around 11:30 and then decided to settle up and leave. I took the responsibility of the tab, since it was small and half mine anyway. Here is where the strangeness begins, for I decided to accumulate more debt onto my tab.

There was a group of three young Korean women eating dinner in the corner of the lounge not far away. As they seemed to be enjoying their meal, I figured it would be fantastic to surreptitiously pay for it, imagining their simultaneous perplexity and delight. If I’d done it as an introduction, there would be a good explanation and no reason to write this post. At the time however, the sheer idiosyncrasy of the situation was compensation enough.

To the ladies whose dinner I purchased, I hope you enjoyed the rest of your night. To myself, why do you delight in the paradox?

This is why organic food:

is not always good for you:

There are definitely times when I feel that preservatives may actually be good things. After all, they do prevent strawberries from getting moldy at the local health-food supermarket!

My habit seems to be to enjoy a glass of wine before I roll into bed, with a book. Right now I’m reading a book in which the author appears in character as himself, which is quite distressing. Even worse, he writes about his fictional character as him through the hindsight of fame, but before he (in this world) became famous. The final straw is that he suggests that works of fiction are real narratives dictating life and events in other worlds. This distresses my free will, and so I sip Pouilly Fuisse.