Okay, periodically the topic of alcohol comes up, and people are almost invariably startled to discover that I don’t drink.  The follow-up questions inevitably follow:  addiction in the family?  Conflict with medication?  Allergy?  Religious beliefs?  Easy drunk?

None of the above.  I just hate the taste. 

Vodka?  Tequila?  Brandy? Rum?  They taste like cough medicine.  $50 wine tastes like cough medicine, rotten grapes, and old wood shavings.  Beer tastes like cough medicine and hops, which are one of the few things possibly more awful-tasting than cough medicine.  Expensive scotch tastes like cough medicine and a deep breath from the smoke column of a campfire.  Also sometimes dirt.

Mixed drinks taste like cough medicine with various fruit/coffee/ice cream flavorings that fail in their attempt the taste of the cough medicine.  (Except for martinis, in which the cough medicine fuses beautifully with the equally atrocious taste of chewing on pine needles.)

And now, Buffy helpfully assists me in expressing the depth of my ‘Dear god this tastes like cough medicine’ feels.  That face she’s making?  EVERY SINGLE TIME.  Sure, I can try whatever concoction you insist will be the one thing that’ll take me beyond my ‘all alcohol tastes like cough medicine’ trap.  But I will end up making the Buffy-face at you.