Chemical Pleasures

I compulsively must try new things. When I recently went to Sunshine mart, a Japanese market in Soho, I overlooked the sushi and seaweed salad, even the plethora of red bean and lychee and green tea-flavored squishy buns, until I found something I definitely wasn't looking for : "Japanese Tamale". Fortunately there was a vegetarian curry option. Even better: the price. At $3.50 for a hefty husk, it was half the cost of any of the sushi options. Then I spent ten minutes trying to find the weirdest possible candy (weird being culturally constructed, of course), opting for a packet of "Yogurt Scotch."

I wonder how some people are content to go with what they know. Are they too timid? Or for them, is the act of trying something new too much of a gamble? I would never gamble money, or no more than $10, tops (as proven by various side trips to the Coeur d'Alene Casino in Idaho, where I tried to make up my losses by drinking $10 worth of free soda--not a great idea when it was an hour drive home). Those who seek the familiar are guaranteed to get what they like. And for all my forays into the unknown, do the times that I've been thrilled really outweigh the times I've been disappointed?

Some scientists suggest our need (or lack thereof) to try new things is hardwired. For some people, trying new things "releases chemicals which produce a feeling of pleasure" in the brain. For others, not so much. Here's a shorty (very) layman's article.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1088827/Why-likely-try-new-exciting-experiences-others.html

I'm at the far end of the spectrum, I think. I'm embarrassed to show my full resume to any potential employer because it's littered with all kind of odds and ends. In the past seven years, I'ved lived in nine cities (and two countries). Often I berate myself--am I adventure-seeking or just indecisive? Travelling solo in Mexico in 2007, on July 25, as I sat on a bus heading to the Sierra Norte mountains, I wrote in my journal:

"Superhero cartoons abound. I just saw a turtle in a cape on the outside of a convenience store. Pigs in the back of a truck. Beautiful graffiti next to the Circo and a McDonald's with its plastic playground walls bulging like a giant eye, a ball of pus. The gear shift looks like a robot kicked through the bottom of the bus, and the driver wields it like a weapon. In these brief instances I am in heaven--at the novelty of it all. I have transcended the known world; I have transformed. Every time I see a donkey in the street or a woman balancing a basket of tortillas on her head, I am born again. This is my drug, and I fear that like most addictions it seems to get harder and harder to achieve my high."

The Japanese Tamale was okay--nothing to write home about. It was much more like a regular tamale than I had envisioned, not much of a fusion dish, heavy on the corn, bland on the vegetable filling. The yogurt scotch turned out to be a hard candy, little lozenges, better if not for the taste but because it truly was strange--slightly sour, indefinable. But I'm reminded of the tamales I did have in Mexico that were truly wonderful. One, in Guanajuate, a cheesy tamale that a street vendor pulled out a plastic bucket that had the gushy texture of velveeta but a fresh-off-the-farm taste. And the other, another, saltier cheese variety, that I had on a bus en route from San Blas to Puerto Vallarta. Vendors would often ride the bus from one town to another, getting on and off merely to sell their wares, much like street musicians and performers ride the subways in New York.

Can we really attribute all our behaviors to our gray (and white, according to that article) matter? Do we seek new things because it triggers chemical pleasures, or is it possible that our choices trigger these pleasures, regardless? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Am I a naive humanist, or am I justified in being skeptical of science's almighty conquests?

I don't remember at all what I ate on the day I went to the Sierra Nortes, but I do recall the hike, in the off-and-on rain, following the guide, a middle-aged native woman of the village who, in her knee-length skirt and plastic shoes, clambered over enormous boulders and scaled slippery slopes with the dexterity of a mountain goat. I remember riding the bus back, adrift in unfamiliar terrain as mountain dissolved into something sparser but not quite desert, floating in a bubble of locals who largely ignored me, speaking a language I largely failed to understand. I remember looking out the window, letting the world slide over me, feeling, for the time being, quite drowsy and full of pleasure.