Wu Liang Ye: Made from industrial wastes?
On Saturday night, my sister had a birthday party. She made sushi, since she is the sushi queen. She asked people to bring, you know, Japanese beers and sake and stuff. One friend brought a bottle of Chinese liquor called Wu Liang Ye.
It quickly became an initiation rite for each new person who arrived at the party: “You have to drink a shot of this. No, you have to. You can’t sit down and eat sushi until you do.”
When I drank my first shot, my entire system shut down for about one-quarter of one-quarter of a second. (That’s a sixteenth of a second, right, Gary?) Then my synapses started firing again, only they weren’t aiming very well, and they mostly missed their targets. Then my tongue started weeping. I mean, copiously weeping. It felt like I’d jammed it inside an old, fermented salty prune, and left it there for a thousand days before pickling it in horse pee. My nose followed. Much clear, thin mucus exited my head via eyes, nose and mouth.
When I could see again, everything looked a little brighter. There were cute little six-pointed stars spinning like pinwheels across the galaxy of my vision. “You know,” I said, “I think that must be the kind of stuff that’s better with the second shot.” So I had another.
This time my synapses were more like machine guns in the hands of eight-year-old guerrilla fighters. They fired anywhere and everywhere at once. No one and nothing was spared. My tongue wept rivers. My eyes squeezed shut, and some distant, still-conscious part of my brain asked, “Why?”
The third and fourth shots were worse and worse still.
I dissed the Wu Liang Ye roundly, soundly and vocally, many times. The young woman who had brought it was very nice and mild about my Chinese-liquor-induced foul cursing.
Now, after a quick Google search — I was wondering which industrial wastes comprised the liquor’s ingredients, so I could visit the nearest toxic waste facility and make my own Chinese moonshine — I realize it was the foot in my mouth that tasted so bad. Cuz it couldn’t have been the liquor.
Turns out Wu Liang Ye is expensive, award-winning and highly prized.
Huh.
I think my initial hypothesis, that it must be an acquired taste, was correct. It must just take more than four shots to acquire it. Maybe you really start to appreciate its quintessence only when you’ve imbibed so much that your mind slips into an alternate dimension and your taste buds begin to pick out the subtle nuances of flavoring from the heaven, the earth and the human parts that went into making it.
Love, Catherine
However, it was a really good game, and a fun season, and I love all my new Fury friends, and I now know not one but TWO — count ’em — heterosexual men who like Patrick Swayze!! Could I be any luckier? Well, yes: I’d be even luckier if one of those men were my very own darling fiancé. But at least Erik has agreed to recreate the Johnny-Baby dance scene from the end of Dirty Dancing at our Austin wedding celebration next summer. 
Now, that makes me happy. (Though I weigh 160 pounds, so I don’t think we’ll be doing The Lift. Maybe I’ll do the little thumbs-out, elbows-wagging move Baby did in the first incarnation of that dance at the neighboring hotel — when she started to do The Lift, got scared and chickened out.)
