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I’ve been thinking much about how we like things and why we like them, the speed at which the process of liking occurs, and the things we like now that we didn’t like at first.

I thought dim sum chicken feet was gross until just a year ago, and now I like it a lot. But I’ve loved kao3fu1, 烤麸 (allegedly the english for this is baked spongy gluten), from the very first time I tried it. Then, there’s something like Chinese whole steamed fish, with all its tiny bones to pick out of your mouth, that I was too scared or lazy to eat as a kid, but maybe around puberty I really started to enjoy.

I find the temporal variance of the delayed onset of liking to be especially noticeable when it comes to songs. Maybe this is because of the temporal nature of The Song as a medium—that it spans a fixed amount of time that we must endure to consume it—and that it is more often consumed in the background, at least for me. And, unlike the album, The Song is a single unit to be consumed as a whole, unlike The Album which tempts you to skip its more unsavory passages.