I am being exceedingly literal.

I think pickiness is related to the taste bud sensitivity that kids have. I was just telling a friend in her thirties onions are ok now.

You know, the distinction between analogy and metaphor has pissed me off for a good many years.

Yes, yes. I know the dictionary distinction. ""Like the thing" -vs- "As the thing".

It is like didactics humping the leg of meaning, if you will forgive my mixed ... thing.

Yeah, I hated pickles and mustard and bell peppers when I was a kid. Couldn't eat anything but mild chile into my teens. I'm indifferent to bell peppers now, but like mustard and pickles and you just try to pry the chile from me.

Augh!

I mourn for the closing of Taco Rio, a local Mom & Pop diner which used much crispier tortillas and better-tasting fine ground taco meat than the chain eateries. They also had taco burgers that were out of this world.

We have a bazillion local Mexican restaurants now, but most of them are authentic sit-down places and there's not a decent take out taco to be found.

Where in the Hell does Mustard map into this?

I was just telling a friend in her thirties onions are ok now.

True, but radishes still are not.

I wasn't being metaphorical in the least, and wouldn't have been making sexual metaphors in the slightest, since I was talking about my kids.

We do the soft tacos too, but to no avail. The kids briefly liked spaghetti without sauce, but Emaryn has decided that spaghetti is bad in all forms and Leif is more flexible but he tends to follow the six-year old wisdom.

What about other kinds of pasta? I know my cousin had (and to some extent still has, at 42) a spaghetti aversion, because he just kept thinking, "worms." I suspect someone translated vermicelli for him, but that's my own little apocrypha.

I remember preferring food to be free of sauce/gravy/toppings until my late teens. But I did grow out of it (well, mostly) if that's any comfort.

Ben's gotten much better about trying new things. As much as it hurts my wallet, I credit the school with outlawing peanut butter. You can only take so much turkey or tuna, so he buys school lunches, and tries new things, without me being there, encouraging him, which is much more fun for him.

It was always very exciting when there was something that I'd eat that my brother didn't like.

I suspect that plays into Julia being such a trooper about trying new foods. She's so much more knowing (in a social situation) than are her brothers.

See? Until Trudy chipped in, I was beginning to think this had nothing to do with sex.

Then Trudy chipped in.