3 posts tagged “rules”
Last night at our holiday party, we served a large selection of cheeses. There were hard cheeses and soft, goat and cow, strong and mild. A plethora of cheese choices. After the party was over and we were cleaning up, I was visually reminded that most Americans have no idea how to eat cheese. It's not that it's hard, but most of us didn't grow up eating a regular cheese course with dinner and we never learned the rules. Don't worry, they're pretty simple:
1. Approach the table or take the cheese plate that is passed to you
2. Determine which cheese you would like to sample
3. Take the cheese knife that is on the plate - do NOT use your own knife unless you are in your own house, eating with your family and there is no cheese knife available. Do not hesitate to ask for a separate knife - often your hosts have simply neglected to put the knife on the plate.
4. Slice the cheese from the side that has already been cut. Make a clean slice from top to bottom
5. If no one has yet cut the cheese (ha ha) cut a straight piece from the end
5a. if the cheese is round, cut a small wedge as you would cut a piece of pie
5b. Cutting is important, don't dink around with it. Cut cleanly and quickly.
6. It is totally fine to take more than one piece of cheese, take a small slice of each of how ever many types of cheese you wish to eat and lay them side by side on your plate.
6a. You can also take some of the fruit and nuts that are on the plate, grapes, pears and walnuts are especially delicious with cheese (as is red wine).
7. Return the cheese knife to the cheese plate - don't worry if it still has some cheese on it, it's nice if it's not too schmutzy, but it's cheese after all and no one expects or even wants you to clean the cheese knife.
8. Take only 1-2 pieces of bread. You can usually get more later and you need to make sure there is enough for everyone.
9. Don't follow your nose. Cheese is one of those complicated foods where your nose can't always help you to know what to do. Some cheeses smell great and taste great. Others don't smell at all and hardly taste like anything. Many stink to the point where your tablemates might insist that you to eat it outside in the rain by yourself, and you will because it tastes heavenly.
9a. Don't trust your eyes either. There is a lot of mold involved in cheese and most of the time, those scary blotchy discolored veins are supposed to be there.
10. DO NOT, and I mean NEVER, EVER EVER scoop out the creamy cheese from the middle of the wheel. I hate to say it, but it is beyond rude - it is gross. It says to everyone who sees you "I don't know how to eat cheese and I don't like the crust, even though most of the time it is delicious and perfectly edible. I just can't deal with it." The guests who follow you and who know better will look at you in horror, then quickly divert their eyes and pretend not to have seen your mistake.
Here's why scooping is such a problem: it leaves the next person in line for cheese with a rotten choice: cut a nice slice of rind with no cheese in the middle, or excavate deeper into the cheese cave and hope for gold. From experience I know that most Americans will choose to become miners and most Europeans will slice away in the hope of fixing the mess. Without this cleanup effort the entire cheese will eventually collapse, walls crumbing in a heap, forever trapping the cheese that remains. This is more than an eyesore, it's wasteful. Last night we threw away five cheeses that had been mined to the point of inedibility.
11. No one cares about your cheese once it is on your plate. Don't want to eat the crust? Don't. Tasted a new cheese you don't actually like? Try to remember it's name for next time and then don't eat it.
It's as easy as one two three um, eleven. As long as you are neat and keep your cheese on your plate you are golden. But make a mess of the lovely and, by the way, very expensive cheese plate and your hostess will be less enamored of you.
You want to get invited back, right?
It's too bad that the middle part of the photo is unreadable, because that is where you can see the rules for panning for GOLD on the Stanislaus river. How fun would that be?!
P.s. This photo is so out of order. How can I show you the rules in the middle of when I am clearly on the river fishing? Bad camera phone. Bad!
I have been thinking a lot about friendship within Vox. Since I am new to social networking, the idea of making friends online with people I have never met is forcing me to evaluate the very idea of what makes someone my friend.
In real life I am not a person with a thousand friends. I have a small number of very dear friends. The kind of friends who would bail be out of a Mexican prison (although this has not been tested), let me sob on their shoulders (yes, I'm sure about this one) and who often care about me more than I care about myself. Some of my friends are just like me, with small circles of close friends, and some of my friends are social butterflies that belong to giant circles.
I like thinking about these groups of friends as circles, although it's not very original, in part because I like the visual idea of circles that link up to make chains of interconnected people. My little Vox community is part of that chain, and it overlaps and intersects with others. (This is the part where everyone should start singing "I'd like to buy the world a coke.") And when I am forming links with new people, I usually start by exploring the connections of my friends.
Having people in my "neighborhood" is a relatively easy concept for me now (although I was a little confused at first). I find people, or they find me, and we connect. Usually the connection goes two ways, but not always. I like to learn about the people I am connecting with so that I am sure that their words/pictures/view of the world will enhance/change/fit with my world as seen through Vox. If a person who hasn't written much in their blog connects to me, chances are good that I will wait a bit before connecting back. I am happy that they connected to me, and I will probably connect with them too, but I don't do it automatically. I read them, and/or look at their pictures to see who they are.
I do this because I know that one day Vox will be filled with hundreds of thousands of people - hopefully millions of them. And if I connect to them all I will have a tidal wave of posts to read and keep up with every day. On the one hand the diversity of this approach is extremely appealing and yet the sheer number of posts that would result feels overwhelming. There are only so many hours in a day, and Vox is already getting quite a lot of them (which is why my husband started calling me a "blogger").
"Friendship" ups the ante for me considerably. Early on, when the only way to read someone was to befriend them, everyone I encountered became a friend. My definition was very open - much more open than in my life offline. Over time, as my circle of people grew and the privacy tools were put in place, I started to think about separating my posts by audience. At some point I realized that I needed my Vox rules of friendship to map closer (but not exactly) to my rules of friendship in real life.
One of my Vox rules of friendship is that it be a two-way street. This comes directly from my life and means that if I have marked someone as my friend, and they haven't after a few weeks or months reciprocated, then I will reevaluate the "friendship." Perhaps I like them more than they like me? Perhaps their definition of friendship is more stringent than mine? In the end, of course, I have no idea. I only know that I am revealing personal posts to someone who is not comfortable revealing personal posts to me. And when I put it to myself that way, I start to feel uncomfortable revealing so much. At which point I often change the friendship status to put them back in the neighborhood. After all, I still like reading them. And perhaps later things will change again and we will befriend each other. Vox, like life, can be like that.
I realize that my rules are my own and possibly don't reflect the rules of any other person around me - even my friends. It's also possible that my way of approaching friendship is out of sync with social networking in general and that over time I will need to adjust my rules to fit the medium. Perhaps it's my demographic (older, married with small children) rearing its ugly head. I don't know. But I'm curious enough to keep going forward, making connections and (hopefully) new friends along the way, so that I can find out.
