Dad post.

My father retains little sense of taste, which you can read as both literal and metaphor. For example, he finds no desire to eat anything fancy, opting for the Diversity Buffet for his Fathers' Day lunch. So I humor him for the sake of filial relations, even though it's gotten lukewarm reviews on a food snob site.

He sweats more in the winter than in the warm months. He rarely wears a jacket, and never a hat or gloves. If you asked him if he liked the scarf for Christmas, he would just give you a reproachful look, as though your interpretation of winter as a cold season was the error.

My dad's hands-down favorite summer-time drink is diet sprite mixed with light beer at a ratio of roughly 1:1. It remains nameless, probably because he doesn't care about trivial things like drink names, and I refuse to drink it, much less think of what to call it.

Once, my dad mixed red wine with iced tea. This remains a 9/11 in our house, as my sister cites this day of mixing in the short litany of storied Braidotti disasters. At family dinners, this reference appears after the divorce, before the house guests of 2005 who wouldn't leave until mid 2006.

Also, my dad's favorite wine is Carlo Rossi, but he was known to offer a case of Boone's Farm wine drinks to my friends in the early 2000s. Carlo Rossi is a metaphor for my dad: it's round, kind of strong, kind of Italian but mostly American, and lacks any irony whatsoever.