I was generally the person ordering the weird item and letting other people taste it. I guess I still am to some extent, but I have more involuntary restrictions on what I order now, so I can’t be as experimental as I like. It’s a bit sad.
To the OP, for me, the busier I am, the more I need to have those set scheduled things. If I don’t have them, they don’t happen. So, you put it on the calendar or suddenly it’s been six months and you haven’t had tacos at all, and you love tacos.
I do Bow Tie Wednesday.
I wore a Seahawks bow tie to work the Wednesday before the Super Bowl. A coworker said, ‘Cool! We should have Bow Tie Wednesday!’ So we do! (OK, I’m the only one who participates. Nevertheless…)
The SO hates them. When I used my Men’s Wearhouse $50 reward, I bought two more for the collection. (They’re normally $50 each, and they were on sale for two-for-$40.) She said she should have gone in with me and told them ‘Do not sell hi any more bow ties!’)
She thinks it’s goofy. I agree. That’s why I wear them. It’s fun.
Also, I found my fez. I’m going to have to get a burgundy bow tie so I can play Doctor Who. 
There’s a couple points to be made here.
If it is a drinkin’ night, it is wise to stick with the familiar. I already know that I can handle, say, ten Lites over four hours and maintain full function alright. They are relatively low in alcohol.
Also, whether they taste great is debatable but that they are less filling is not.
I also know that I’ll wake up fresh as a daisy. If I start mixing weird weiss beers or lambics, headacheville is the best I can expect.
Finally, for those watching our carbs & calories intake, light macrobrews are hard to beat.
This isn’t to say that I don’t occasionally enjoy other beers, especially with meals, it is that there are other aspects to consider besides variety.
Like Monstro, I can and do eat very similar lunches for weeks or months at a time. I make a week’s worth on Sunday, bring it in on Monday and take the dishes home on Friday to start all over again. I enjoy the food I prepare, I enjoy preparing the food and it is one less thing to worry about during the weekend.
I get food, and do it myself. I don’t get movies so much, until it’s been long enough that you’ve gotten nostalgia for it. A large portion of the enjoyment of a movie is not already knowing the story, so you can’t just choose to watch a movie because you knew you liked it before. Sure, this happens with food, too, if you eat it often enough, but it’s much quicker with anything with a narrative.
Particularly with comedies. Humor works on surprise. So on that second viewing, all those jokes you found to be hilarious are no longer going to be so. Sure, maybe you can get more out on a second viewing, due to now knowing the ending, and that can make up for the lack of humor. But, after that?
I just don’t get how you can enjoy a movie so much that it’s not boring the third time. Well, unless you wait long enough for it to gain value by nostalgia and by the fact that you don’t remember everything. Yet so many people seem to watch things so often they have all the funny bits of dialog memorized. That I don’t get.
Am I correct that, for you, the enjoyment curve doesn’t go down nearly as quick for you with media? And, if so, what is it that you enjoy about that third time watching a movie within, say, a week or a month? Especially if it’s a comedy?
Why do people try to pass off their thinly veiled judgment of others as legitimate, innocent questions?
Clearly the OP likes to live his life in a certain way and has very strong feelings about his choices, and that’s just fandabidozi. But why act like it is *unfathomable *that other people make different choices? You don’t understand why some people value different things than you? Really?
I wish this board had a “like” button.
Oh, I’m sure OP does. “Questions” like these are usually just sneak-bragging.
I’m sitting here pissed off on your behalf. You found something that works for you and people need to MTOB. I haven’t gone as far as my father who ate peanut butter crackers and dirt cookes (you know, the two-pound store brand sandwich cookies) every day of his twenty-four years at work, but I am leaning toward something utilitarian that will get me through the day cheaply and without inducing a food coma.
And to the OP, I am EXTREMELY risk-averse and a safe life where I know I will enjoy my choices appeals to me.
I call the OP’s attention to his own thread title: “Variety is the *spice *of life”. Italics mine.
A diet of pure spice is unhealthy. And unappetizing for most folks. A diet utterly devoid of spice is arguably a bit unhealthy. And certainly unappetizing for most folks.
You’ll notice the aphorism, polished over hundreds of years of English usage in many varied places and cultures is not “variety is the staff of life.” Nor is it “a variety a day keeps the doctor away.”
It’s spice fer gosh sakes; an optional ingredient best used as a small percentage of the total diet. And one where skilful use gives more benefit than heavy use.
Or at least so seth the majority. My personal take is more adventurous / varietous than most. But I’m not going to whine that they’re all wrong. If nothing else, them being as they desire keeps the lines shorter at my adventures.
For me personally, a pinch of cayenne pepper is the spice of life.
Novelty is overrated.
Novelty distracts from getting the job done. And getting the job done is job one.
Novelty addiction is another dangerous addiction and should be treated as one.
(No, I’m not being particularly sincere in every aspect of all of those. But you’ll hear those arguments.)
TBH, novelty requires you to pay attention to stuff beyond your nose. If you don’t think you have attention to spare, you won’t spare it. Really, sometimes just living life takes all the energy and attention you can muster.
To me, at least, there’s a balance to be struck between the tried and true, and the new and novel, in that the tried and true is just that- you know it works, you know you like it, etc… But there’s a lot of merit in the new and novel; it may work better, it may test better, or it may just be different, which is a sort of merit in its own right.
I think the OP is getting at a certain class of people who to me, seem to be extremely risk averse, even when the risk is negligible. It’s like the very concept of trying new things is risky to them, so they stick with the same old crap.
I mean, I understand having tried and true defaults, and sometimes just going for what works, but being unwilling to try new stuff or branch out strikes me as a sign of something larger going on in their psyche. After all, for most of these things, the actual risk is negligible- if you don’t like your pint of Craft Beer du Jour, then order a Bud Light. You’re out $4. Or if you don’t like the goose gizzards braised in white ale and sauced with a microcitrus reduction, then buy a freaking hamburger on the way home. But try them!
But deciding that you won’t like it and being unwilling to try is frankly, a childish behavior. I have a toddler/small boy, and how I’m describing adults as acting is EXACTLY how he acts.
It seems to be a control thing with him- maybe these risk-averse types are very insecure?
Let alone have sex exclusively with the same person for the rest of your life.
Wow, I could have written this about myself, nearly word for word. I eat the same thing for lunch every day, because I can’t be bothered to come up with elaborate or interesting lunches and I’ve found what works best for me.
And my co-workers (across a handful of different jobs over the years) ALWAYS give me a hard time about it, to the point where I rarely eat my lunch in the breakroom. I’ve been accused of having eating disorders from co-workers before, people eyeing me suspiciously because they almost never see me eat.
I don’t have a goddamn eating disorder. I just like the same thing for lunch every day and I’m sick to death of people commenting on it. My husband also eats the same thing (PBJ sandwich) for lunch every day as well, so it’s nice to have someone who gets it. But since he’s a dude, he doesn’t get the quizzical, suspicious looks when people think his eating habits are odd and possibly anorexic-y.
We do go to a different restaurant about once a month (140 new restaurants since moving here), and I do experiment with making new dishes for dinner, though.
Because classic rock is fucking awesome. That’s why it’s called classic. Somethings are just so good they last. Others are just fads. (Do you avoid classical music because it’s old?)
And Bud Light sucks. If I’m partial to any brand, it’s usually Rolling Rock.
More like ruled by fear. If I go somewhere unusual and I don’t like the food or don’t feel comfortable, it shows in my demeanor as much as I try to overcome it, and then I look like that childish asshole. It happens enough times and I just don’t feel like putting myself or others through it, so I opt out.
And it’s funny you should say what you did – I went along to a birthday dinner at a place where them describing the local ingredients and what they did with them took longer than actually eating. The food was OK but not worth the buildup. And on the way home I was still hungry and had to stop for McDonald’s!
I LOVE French/Ethiopian cuisine!
Rocks in a buttery wine sauce… DROOL
Some people don’t do things for the same reason you never gave a 400 lb man a blumpkin. They are not opposed to variety, they are simply not interested in whatever you think they should be interested in. It is interesting that you (despite knowing very little about hyoo-mons) think you know better than anyone else what they should like.
I am in my 70’s, and stay pretty much up on current technology, politics, social changes and such. I am pretty well known in my social group for my “keeping up to date” attitudes and interests.
However, I do listen to 40’s music on my satellite radio. The reason is simple - I get warm memories from big band music that I don’t get from any other musical genre. I listen to many different types of music, but at the end of the day, only the music I heard as a young boy has such sweet evocative tugs and memories for me.
Well some people, like me, just prefer routine and parameters. I do best when I know exactly what’s going to happen and when.
So, consider this: I decide to go on vacation somewhere I’ve never been before. I’ll go, but I like to have it scheduled well in advance, with a basic plan for what I’m going to do while there (with open blocks of time planned in just in case I come upon something interesting I didn’t know was there).
Just up and saying: “Yeah, I’m gonna call in sick tomorrow, then hop on a plane and head for Montreal* and just see what happens!” wouldn’t work for me.
*I actually would love to see Montreal, but affording a flight is OOTQ right now anyway.
There are times when you don’t want to spend the time and energy to plan meals. The idea of “Taco Tuesday” makes a lot more sense to me as a parent of a toddler than it did pre-kids. Throw in a picky eating kid or two, and it makes even more sense. It makes shopping and cooking easier (both of these tasks can be non-trivial if you have a toddler). Working long hours at a demanding job might also leave you little time or energy to research new recipes and get the ingredients you’d need for them. Or maybe you have another hobby that you’d rather spend your time and energy doing. Some people just don’t like researching new recipes. They find it as tedious as you find watching a movie for the fifth time.
You already have the videos in your library. To get a new video, you have to make an effort to find a video that you’d be interested in, and get it. If you mostly watch videos when you’re too tired to make an effort to do something else, that extra bit of effort is not going to be an attractive proposition.
Some people go to a particular restaurant because they like a particular dish there. If they ordered something else, they wouldn’t get the thing they really like, and they would feel deprived. Some of these people might have food allergies or intolerances, or simply not like a common ingredient (cilantro being a common example). It’s a pain to grill a server about whether or not there is a particular ingredient in a dish, or to ask that the dish be made without it.
Some people dismiss a genre of movies because of a phobia. I can’t watch gore in a movie. It upsets me so much that I’m not likely to remember much about the movie except that it had that one scene that totally disgusted me. So I don’t watch horror movies, as they are very likely to have a component that spoils the whole thing for me. Kind of like how if a dish has mushrooms in it, that overpowers and ruins anything else about it for my father-in-law.