DrunkasaurusRex.com - March 17, 2008

Growing up, I was just smart enough to be right most of the time, and just dumb enough to think I knew everything. I knew what I loved, and I knew what I hated. I knew what was good, and I knew what was bad. It wasn't until college, when I was exposed to a myriad new ideas, perspectives, and cultures, that my mind began to truly expand and I started questioning my firmly entrenched beliefs. Maybe Back to the Future isn't the best comedy of the 80s. Even if you did watch it every other weekend with your dad. Maybe raw tomato isn't so bad. You slap some buffalo mozzarella and basil on it, and then hit it with some olive oil, salt n pepper, and you've got yourself a damn fine snack.

That's the goal of higher education, isn't it? To expose young people with a thirst for knowledge and experience to people and places and things they would never ordinarily confront? We all want our lives to look something like this I think

and college is what's supposed to propel us on that trajectory through our twenties until we achieve another level of wisdom in our thirties, upon having children before we are ready and getting married because there is nowhere else to take a relationship after 5 years once you've moved in together and bought a dog and a car together.

I was very much on that path until I settled into a well-paying paralegal job right out of college that required long hours and very little critical thinking. My first assignment was to put 75,000 printed out emails in chronological order and remove the duplicates. It took four months and a piece of my spirit. A year later, I was charged with assembling the Plaintiffs and Defendants trial exhibits from a previous case into binders for review. Each side had 2500 exhibits. By this time I'd earned enough leeway in my position to make certain executive decisions. It was up to me, and me alone, to determine which set would go in blue binders and which set would go in black binders. The Defendants exhibits would go in the black binders, I decided, because the Defendants were bad and black is the bad guy color. This project took two months to complete and culminated in a knockdown, drag out scream fest in my manager's office during my review when she told me the main reason I wasn't getting a full raise was because the exhibit binder project took longer than it should have. Shit like this went on for close to four years.

You'd think at some point I might start to question my intelligence, my competence. Start questioning the wisdom of my post-college decision making. You'd be wrong. I reverted back to my pre-college ways. I grew more intractable with subjective issues of good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, smart vs. dumb. Because I'd graduated in four years from a good school and I was smarter than most everyone I worked with, I didn't just think I knew everything...I KNEW I knew everything. The fact that my intellect was stagnating and my intellectual curiosity had all but disappeared never dawned on me. Until I realized what the hell I was doing about a year and a half before I quit and went to law school, my trajectory looked like the S&P 500 after Black Monday.

That was five years ago. I've spent much of the intervening time on a personal intellectual reclamation project. Questioning assumptions. Trying things I'd once hated. Watching, listening, and reading things I'd previously refused to watch, hear, or read. I've been remarkably successful, I think. My head is screwed on pretty straight for a guy who still cannot shake the innate sense of awesomeness that roils around inside him. One of the only things that has not changed since those early days, however, is my absolute disgust with olives, pickles, and Brussels sprouts. Although, now that I think about it, even that's not true.

At Thanksgiving a few months ago, I changed my mind about Brussels sprouts. For the longest time I've loathed the sight and the smell of those vial cabbage nuggets with their yellow mucus-colored centers and teenage mutant ninja turtle green shells. I'd see them on a restaurant menu and immediately pronounce that establishment the last place on earth at which I would choose to sit down to a meal. I'd hearken back to adolescence, my parents' marriage unraveling around them, when one night my father decides to take a stand against the chaos and insists that my sister and I FINISH YOUR DAMN BRUSSELS SPROUTS WITH LEMON BUTTER SAUCE AND DON'T THINK ABOUT GETTING UP FROM THE TABLE UNTIL YOU DO!

The Brussels sprouts smelled like rotting human flesh. The lemon butter sauce smelled like anti-tetanus ointment I had to use years earlier when I pinched my little hand in a rusted folding beach chair I'd perched atop a stack of tires at Sears Point Raceway to get a better view of my uncle racing. The smell and the taste were so bad not even my dog would eat them when we cajoled him under the kitchen table and sneaked the turd pearls down to him. He was a yellow lab mix who would ordinarily eat anything besides grapes that you put in front of him. He sniffed the smegma-colored garden dingleberries only once and scurried out from under the table with his haunches down and his tail between his legs like we'd tricked him into a trip to the vet.

I had Brussels sprouts only one time after that--at a dinner party thrown by a girlfriend's mother about ten years later. These were steamed, but not sauced, and their texture engaged my gag reflex with nearly every bite. Of the 7 or 8 generously spooned onto my plate, I managed to force down 1.25 of them. They were enough to ruin the rest of the dinner for me. It should be no shock that this dinner, at the nadir of my Black Monday arrogance and ignorance, was the beginning of the end for that relationship.

Fast forward to November 2007 and The (New) Girlfriend and I have decided to spend Thanksgiving in DC with her best friend from back home and her husband. They've become good friends of both of ours, so it took the sting out of being unable to go back to California for a home-cooked Thanksgiving. After the pleasantries, the "can I take your coats" and "what can I get you to drink", I ask our hosts, "so what's for dinner?" They run through the menu going from biggest to littlest until they land, with a thud, on Brussels sprouts. My face dropped noticeably. "Don't worry," they tell me, "you'll like these. Even our little nephew who doesn't eat anything green unless its candy likes these." To say I was skeptical is to say only half of it.

Dinner rolls around two hours later and there they sit. A large rustic bowl filled with Mother Nature's shit grenades. Fittingly, the bowl ends up right in front of me, staring me down, mocking my provincial refusal to consider them. Our friend watched me reject them. "Try it Nils. I promise you'll like them. They're sauted in butter with bacon and onions and a little garlic." Well, hello nurse. I can think of very little that does not taste good when combined with butter, bacon, onions, and garlic. I'd eat out a dead hooker if she were lightly cooked with those ingredients. I scooped out a few sprouts and quickly popped one in my mouth just to get it over with. I took a bite and chewed. Then I took another. And another. Each bite was an explosion of flavor. Buttery, bacony, oniony, garlicky flavor. I was flabbergasted. Surely these were some other kind of sprout. There's no way Brussels could have just up and changed their sprout recipe after all these years. "No," they assured me, "those are good ol' fashioned Brussels sprouts." I had four or five more.

I was converted and my gastronomic IQ took off like the price of Google stock. Maybe someday the same thing will happen for me with pickles and olives, although I doubt it. I know what's good and I know what I like, and those two things are neither.

Posted by nils at 2:20 PM