Cheese & Wine (& Love) 101

For Steve's birthday, his fiance Kat suggested surprising him at a class for Artisanal's Cheese & Wine 101. It was really an awesome thing to do and totally worth it. You get four glasses of wine (with unlimited refills!) to try with a plate of cheeses. (Or is it cheese? Is cheese plural?) Our plates included the spendy Blaue Geiss above, which they sell for $80. Yeah.

I don't think I actually learned anything, because I had too much wine. But it was a fun way to spend the evening, especially if you go with friends. Even if you have a strict teacher who doesn't like when you giggle and make cheese jokes.

The most interesting part of the night happened a few days later, when a friend received a long, secret-admirer email from someone we can only guess was an employee at the event. (This friend has attended more than one of these classes. Too many, clearly.)

Now, is there any way – over the age of 14 – to send an appropriate anonymous love letter? We debated it, and I've come to the conclusion of no. While it's perfectly nice and flattering in a way, it's also incredibly invasive. The anonymity of it is what I don't like. When you like someone, you ought to do the socially acceptable thing where you stare at them and smile and make awkward conversation and do other physical things that make it clear that you like them, so they can clearly do the vague, physical acceptance or rejection (smiling and engaging/avoiding.) Obviously this is challenging, but it allows the relationship to flow through a Panama canal of checkpoints. Doing a massive emotional dump on an unsuspecting victim is like screaming at a stranger for getting in your way. Well, maybe not that bad, but it ignores all of those little polite and important interactions for the sake of indulging your emotional impulses. It's rude and selfish. Not too mention a little creepy for the "I love you based on what you look like without knowing one other thing about you."

But maybe I'm just a cynic. Millions of people will watch New Year's Eve and enjoy it, right?