One man's trash...

The variety of human taste is something that has always haunted me. Admittedly, there are many aspects where the taste is mostly irrelevant: there is essentially no difference between strawberry or chocolate ice cream, between espresso or cappuccino, between painting your room in ivory or in pearl white. And because these preferences are very unlikely for our survival they can be cemented in the most outrageous ways: if you ate peanut butter the day you fought with your best friend you might never eat peanut butter again, if your dentist's office is certain tone of pale blue you will probably be reluctant to use that color in your walls or in your child's clothing, etc. The association can also work in a positive way, making you fond of a food, a color, a song just because it is linked in your mind with a pleasant situation.

But there are other preferences with much more deep-cutting effects. When you discard whole food groups instead of single dishes, getting fed can start to become problematic: being a vegan or a vegetarian in temperate or tropical climates might not pose a serious obstacle, but certain boreal peoples like the Sami in Northern Europe or the Inuit in North America just cannot afford the luxury of not eating meat, because they do not have that many options to start with. So we are back to the availability of choices: having not alternatives make the (non-) election very easy, you just go with whatever is available.

Photo: Christian Guthier

There is however a whole set of tastes that I still find a bit disturbing: the acquired tastes. This does not mean that I am free of them (I like both coffee and tea as much as the next person), but one can only wonder at the amount of suffering we are willing to endure (or even ignore) in exchange for the fulfillment of this taste. Some of them are social, like the bitterness of coffee or the kick of spicy food, and consuming them (normally in groups) probably helps binding the group together. Others are aesthetic like the pain of exercising or getting tattoos, all of which we are willing to put up with (even repeatedly) for the pleasure of looking good. Horror movies and roller coasters are also acquired tastes that appeal to our emotions by making us believe that we are in danger even if we are not. One example that I am particularly fond of are the intellectual challenges, like jigsaw puzzles, sudoku, and many other pass-times which do not produce anything of use except the excitement of making progress and the satisfaction of completing them.

During the conference call with my family two weeks ago, Jack mentioned that he was planning to buy this old walnut armchair to try to restore it because he was sick and tired of seeing IKEA-style furniture like his own in many of his friends' houses. He made it very clear that he did not this in order to get a great armchair, because he has never restored any furniture before, but this one was cheap enough that it would not bother him too much if he found himself incapable of achieving something "acceptable". This week he confirmed that he had bought the chair and started to treat the woodworm infestation with a spray, realizing that the chair was in pretty bad condition because spraying the insecticide into one of the holes frequently lead to it coming out a different one. I do not know if he will manage to produce a chair he can actually sit on, but I am sure he will have many evening of mind-cleansing manual work. It is not that different from all the evenings Karen and I spend putting jigsaw puzzles together, only that Jack's puzzle does not come with a blueprint.

Going back over the history, it is fairly obvious that he should have gotten the chair for free, because it was essentially trash for the previous owner, that had allowed it to deteriorate so far. However, because he showed some interest for it, it automatically stopped being trash and became an asset. One way or another, he will learn something from the experience, we will get a lot of things to talk about and the former owner probably got to have a nice dinner on account if my brother's newfound treasure. Stay tuned.