8 February 2000

The circus is coming early this year. I usually associate the arrival of the circus with early spring - March-ish. Last year, we went to the show on March 8. This year it was sheer luck that I noticed the circus was in town. My "home" page for my browser at work is a local newspaper, and when the page loads, random articles are selected from various sections to display on the "front" page. Yesterday when I fired up my browser, the section called "Things To Do" had randomly selected the circus, which is in town starting Wednesday and running through Saturday. I could've missed it, not looking for it for several more weeks!

I dropped Matt an e-mail, asking if he wanted to go. He suggested we ask our friends. I asked K.T., but the only night Kevin has off is Thursday, and they're feeling sortof strapped for cash at the moment anyway. Jim and my dad joined Becky and I walking around the circle yesterday, so I asked them. Jim and his wife are going to be out of town this weekend, but Dad thought that Mom would want to go, and I bullied Becky into agreeing. (It didn't take much. "You know you want to!" "Um... Okay!" Like that.)

Becky's friend (boyfriend? Even she doesn't know!) Todd decided that he wants to go, too, and it turned out that the best time for everyone was Friday evening. So, I just logged off from TicketMaster's website, and we have six tickets! (It took the database some time to find six seats all together. I'd been hoping for second-best seats, but had to settle for third-best. Oh, well, at $19 a pop it's probably for the best. But I'm glad I didn't wait any longer to order the tickets!

Karen chided me last night for abusing chocolate by putting it in coffee.

"But!" I protested, "Chocolate is a slut! It'll go with just about anyone!"

K.T. reminded me last night of a brilliant revelation I'd come to last week that I wanted to share with you. No, wait, come back! This is even better than the cat theory!

It started because K.T. and I were talking about cheese. K.T. adores cheese. I like it okay, but consider it just an accessory. (We'd been talking about Mexican food, but our difference becomes clearest when we're eating Italian or pizza: as far as I'm concerned, the cheese is just there as a decorative topping and to keep the tomato sauce - the real reason to eat these foods - from escaping. In K.T.'s mind, the cheese is the primary ingredient, and everything else is secondary.) Anyway, I mentioned that where cheese was concerned, there were about three cheeses that I especially liked, one or two that I knew I disliked, and most of the rest got shuffled into basic categories of color, texture, and sharpness. K.T. immediately listed about twenty different specific types of cheese that she really likes - really, it was like that Monty Python sketch.

"Actually," I realized, "I feel about cheese pretty much the same way I feel about music: There are a few things that I feel passionately about, and the rest of it is just background."

K.T. then realized that she, too, felt about cheese the same way she felt about music, which is to say, she's passionate about the entire category, she likes a wide variety of it and every one is distinct and different in her mind.

And thus was born the Theory of Cheese and Music! Further testing will have to be done, of course, to discover whether the correlation is one of cause and effect (in one direction or the other), or whether they are both caused by an as-yet-undiscovered third parallel.