You can’t sip that tea for long- tea of the Past. It feels warm, coats the soul with a glow sometimes, but it’ll take you and if you aren’t careful you won’t come back, won’t stop sipping that golden drink. You may lose yourself forever in it’s gilded shores.

I hated swiss cheese. When I was young I was in charge of making my Dad’s sandwich for work every day. It had to be done right- professionally even- meats placed into little scrunches on the roll, swiss cheese and lettuce shreds on top.

Now, you need to fully understand my commitment to cheese as a food group all its own, majestic in texture, taste, smell- all of it. I’m one of those individuals that believes there’s no such thing as too much cheese.

Back then though, the taste of swiss cheese disgusted me, which was a difficult pill to swallow because it looked delicious. Creamy white color, cool holes you could stick your fingers through- I mean it basically had all the ingredients to an excellent recipe, but when I tasted it??!! BARF CITY. Disgusting to me in every way. For some reason though, each day I’d look at it as I placed it carefully on the sandwich and think, “today is the day it’s going to taste amazing to me”. Every SINGLE day I would take a bite out of the cheese, realize it still tasted the same, spit it out disgusted, and place the regurgitated cheese slice on my Dad’s sandwich. Nope, not today. Still gross. (Now Pops, if you’re reading this know I love you so very much, and also you’re welcome for giving you such an amazing immune system. Children are disgusting germ factories. By infecting your beloved lunch with small doses of bacteria I helped your body to create massive amounts of antibodies, thus ensuring future autoimmune responses were quick and deadly to all viruses and illness). I’ll be awaiting your “thank you call”.

So everyday I do this. I’m talking five days a week, fifty- two weeks a year. Take a bite spit it out, place it, repeat. Sometimes it wasn’t swiss; he’d get provolone and WHO could refute the amazingness of that cheese- but mostly it was what it was. My stubborn a** couldn’t get over the fact that I hated a cheese so I just kept at it, day after day. Until one day, it didn’t taste so bad. Then it started to taste good, even better- and pretty soon I lived by it.

To this day provolone is my favorite but swiss comes in at a close second. Sometimes I ponder the ridiculous amount of effort I exerted into evolving my taste buds to enjoy a specific type of food. Because it was for a cheese, I definitely understand. I also marvel at the feat of reprogramming a personal hard drive to actually derive pleasure from something that you once were disgusted by. I assume that if one can do this with swiss cheese, just because the thought of disliking a cheese is too horrific to mentally bare, than you can probably do it with anything in life if you set your mind to it and persevere.