Martinis

The subject under discussion is the proper mixing of a martini. Because it needs to be discussed.

A few days ago, I was lucky enough to find myself at an event with a wide open bar, the services of which I did not hesitate to avail myself. After padding my tongue with a few of the more subdued libations, I placed the order that any gentleman of discriminating taste has to place at some point during the evening. I called for a martini.

The bartender proceeded to use the cap of the vermouth bottle to measure out a portion of that spirit, and followed it up by freehanding a rather significant fraction of a bottle of Tanqueray into the shaker. The resulting drink contained, needless to say, much too many parts gin and far too few parts vermouth.

Now, there have been many claims regarding the best way to combine the rare effervescence of vermouth gin. Some say you should pour a scant quarter ounce into the martini glass, swirl it once, and discard the rest. Others say that you should merely place the vermouth bottle in a ray of the morning sun that is subsequently incident on the martini glass. Still others say the ideal method is to concentrate very hard on the bottle of vermouth that you have left unopened in your liquor cabinet as you shake two ounces of gin. (Winston Churchill, you alcoholic.) This is all poetic bullshit.

The mystique surrounding the extra-dry martini is ridiculous. Show me a man who orders a martini extra-dry, and I'll show you a man who doesn't have the balls to order a shot of cold gin. Vermouth is absolutely essential to the perfect martini. Consider the gin and tonic: all by their lonesomes, tonic water and gin are both fairly unappetizing ingredients that few willingly drink. But mix them together, and you have one of the truly classic, and classy, concoctions of any generation. The same holds true with gin and vermouth. They complement each other; one falls flat in the absence of its partner. The quality that makes the drink is not the flavor of gin drowning out vermouth, it is the dynamic interplay between the two.

Gin tastes like Christmas; this is a fact that has been observed by so many reliable witnesses that it brooks no disputation. But like any Christmas present, gin is naked without a wrapping. You cannot simply pour a slug of Bombay Sapphire into a glass and expect to please. It requires some accoutrements, some dressing. In the case of the martini, this is the vermouth. The vermouth tempers the gin; it calms it without robbing it of any vital characteristics. This is why the martini is the truly classic cocktail: it takes the base spirit with the most complex flavor, and allows one to savor that flavor without being overwhelmed by it. The taste of vermouth should not be anemically intrusive. It should be strong but submissive, pronounced but restrained. Balance must be maintained.

The real martini is mixed with 1/2 ounce dry vermouth and 2 ounces London gin, and it is served straight up and ice cold. It is not made with apple schnapps, it is not made with orange flavored what-have-you, and it is not ever, ever goddammit, made with vodka. If you go to a bar and order a martini, and they ask you if you'd like it with gin or vodka, they are insulting your intelligence as a drunkard and connoisseur. Never drink a vodka martini. An angel dies every time you do. End of story.

Go drink. Now, dammit.

Let me tell you a story

About how awesome life is right now. In theory, this is my easy, laid-back, lots-of-free-time semester, but for a variety of reasons, that hasn't quite materialized yet. Instead, the past couple of weeks have been more like, "wake up at 9, go go go go go, sleep, repeat." Making a PowerPoint presentation for this weekend's charity auction, training no less than four people to fill two of the positions I currently occupy, and remembering how to do differential equations are, it turns out, significant time drains.

So why is life awesome? I have all but officially received a summer research internship at ORNL, and a dude from Northwestern just called me to let me know that I'm probably going to be accepted with financial aid. Boo-ya.

Inspect, Sir or Madam, my sleeve...

Things have gotten to a point where I am truly and sincerely irked at many of the obligations I have. When I first began working as an A/V tech for the college, it was interesting. I got to fiddle with a bunch of crazy equipment, my boss didn't treat me like an idiot and gave me a lot of responsibility, and I got to drive the awesome old red van around campus. The fact that I did, and do, get paid peanuts for the work is rather beside the point; the job was appealing because it was flexible and on campus. I do still value it for these reasons, but in the past year the job has become rote and annoying, and I have developed a habit of shunting it to the side whenever possible. You can only set up speakers and microphones so many times before it loses its charm.

I've experienced the same problem (on a much shorter time scale) at the Flat Hat. This job was initially appealing because it required (I believed) a minimal time investment and consisted entirely of mindless work, for which I would be well-paid. This is true, but as I became better acquainted with the position, it became clear that doing a good job would require a slightly greater time investment, and would consist of work that was indescribably boring but was involved enough to demand attention. I stopped enjoying both of these jobs some time ago, but I do still enjoy receiving a paycheck, and so have continued to suffer them. But they require time, and time is the thing that I'm least inclined to give them.

The real problem with devoting time to these jobs is not the jobs themselves, but what they're keeping me from. It has reached a point where I am starting to get some (very general, non-specific, vague) ideas of what I want to spend my time on, and these ideas do not include recording a capella performances of mediocre college groups or tallying the advertising accounts at the school newspaper.

When I say "what I want to spend my time on," I'm not talking about a "Gee, I think I'd like to sit down and read this book for a while" kind of feeling. What I mean is that right now, at the beginning of this semester, I am fired up about my classes and about learning this new material. I'm cracking open my textbooks and thinking, "God damn, this looks really interesting. I want to really sit down this semester and get a good handle on this." I'm working through a problem and becoming extremely involved in writing a routine to build a B-spline approximation to a function. And I know that it's horribly, horribly dorky, and I don't care. Previously in my "college career," classes and math were things that I did because I was good at them and because there was a nagging feeling in the back of my head that it would all pay off one day; they weren't things that I was inspired to do in and of themselves. But for the past couple of semesters, math has become something that truly grips my interest; it has become something that I very much want to devote my time to. Population diffusion models? Lay that shit out. Hermitian matrices? Give me a heaping spoonful. It is to the point where I am, bless my little head, excited by all this.

The fact that I am excited is itself exciting, and also frustrating. Exciting for the obvious reasons: I've found some things that I am deeply interested in, and that I (would) happily invest my time with. It's exciting because the longer I study this subject, the more certain I become that I've found a niche that I can be happily productive in, and that applying to continue studying this subject in graduate school was the right choice. It's frustrating because the world at large is essentially ignorant of my newfound direction: random part-time jobs continue to impose themselves, professors continue to assign work, and I don't have the kind of time that I want for devoting to geekier pursuits.

This is the source of the dim view I currently have of my jobs and other responsibilities. What were initially pleasant and profitable distractions have become merely distractions that I could do without. These are temporary problems, however, and knowing that I'll be shedding many of these obligations as the semester progresses makes it easier to put up with them now. In fact, I really have so little to complain about it's laughable. In spite of everything, I fully expect this semester to be a wonderful end to a wonderful four years.