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WHAT IS IT ABOUT the things you like that makes you like them? I've been researching my taste a lot lately, trying to get to the bottom of my likes and dislikes, and it's fascinating stuff.

Figuring out a taste is easy when you have a community of people with the same taste and when everything is unified into one sort of general aesthetic--hipsters, for instance. The girl-pants go with the Chuck Palahniuk novels, which go with the Wes Anderson movies--everything coordinated into a nice, unified whole.

When you've got a social group to pick up on, the enjoyment of things themselves is social (talking about music, admiring one another's fashion ensembles). It's more troublesome when you don't quite have a group of people with stable, established taste that's the same as yours--when you sort of float around, like myself. But the unification of tastes is just as present and important for floaters. To have your sensibilities link up and harmonize with one another is a really sweet task for any person.

When I look into my own tastes, there isn't so much a uniform style, but a duality. In music, I have a neat split between liking sensitive, soft indie rock (Bright Eyes, Band of Horses) and confrontational, super self-confident hip-hop (MF Doom, Ghostface Killah). There's not much half-stepping.

In philosophy, there's a similar split: On the one hand, I love the gentle, acquiescent Buddhists and Taoists. But I am also buddy-buddy with the epic-heroic, triumphant warrior philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I think it's good to embody some conflicts and contradictions in yourself. As Heraclitus says, the universe is maintained on the tension of opposites.

Another aspect of my taste that I'm starting to figure out is my fetish for "the cult of personality." I always find a book or album much, much more interesting when I am interested in the person behind it. Goethe was like that--I read his biography first and fell in love with him from there. I don't even know if I'd dig his books and poems half as much if I didn't know the life that gave birth to them. I watched a documentary of interviews by Charles Bukowski, my latest fascination, before reading his poems, and the person sold me on the art.

This digging into yourself is super-useful, as well. The more I've been plugging into the things I like, the more I start to realize the structures lying underneath everything, and the more I get some idea of what I'd like next. Where I used to just let art assail me, randomly coming at me from all angles, I now have some sort of idea of what I'd like, which helps.

Of course, you have to leave this kind of thing open-ended and indeterminate or else you'll just be keeping lots of new, refreshing things away. Because at the end of the day, your interpretations of your taste are, themselves, only a matter of taste.

Joe Holmes is a student at the University of Mary Washington. Reach him at jholmes3@umw.edu.