Dichroic Reflections

tell me, if you care

I've been writing this entry in my head since Friday afternoon and somehow it hasn't wanted to come out and play on screen. Maybe that's because the whole thing boils bown to four words: interested people are interesting. And its corollary, bored people are boring.

Friday evening, with Rudder away, I went out to a very nice bar with a coworker and a bunch of her friends. Let me put it this way: I enjoyed the drive home more than the time at the bar. I did get to have a nice glass of red wine, and some minutes pleasant conversation with the oldest woman in the group, an English woman who told me about the other countries she'd lived in and how much she had enjoyed it. Otherwise, though, no one seemed much interested in talking to me about anything, and though they were talking to each other, that didn't seem to be about anything much, either. On the way home, I listened to Alice Cooper on the radio, talking about how many rock riffs have been sampled into hip-hop, and how that works easily because of the 4-beat hip-hop uses (I think that's what he said). I don't care much about hip-hop or music sampling, but Alice does, and he knows a bit about it and it was interesting to hear him on the subject.

In contrast, last night some friends had us over for dinner, and had also invited a friendly acquaintance (that is, someone I've always liked a lot, but we've never quite advanced as far as friendship for whatever reason) and her boyfriend, whom we hadn't met. We talked about rowing, our common thread, even though three of the other four had stopped for various reasons and the fourth canoes instead. We talked about raising children, though only three of the six of us there have any. We joked a lot. We talked about friends, and our various jobs, and we talked a lot about our assorted travels. I wasn't bored for a second. (As a bonus, there were excellent food and adorable though shy toddlers.)

I've noticed that I can be interested in almost any subject, if the person who's talking about it has a passion for it. This applied in college, where I was bored out of my skull in Stress of Materials class and fascinated in Advanced Mechanics (gears and four-bar mechanisms): they were taught by the same professor, but the latter was his subject of interest. I've never been terribly fond of the Romantic Poets, but they were much better when taught by a professor who loved them. In more casual conversation, I've been enthralled by discourses on topics from the chemical behavioral cues of ants to when and why dams should be removed, because the people who were discoursing cared about those things.

Tell me about your hobby, your child, your thesis subject, your job (or even how you hate your job): if you have a passion for what you're speaking of, I'm probably going to be happy to hear about it, for at least a moderate length of time. I realize I'm spoiled. I'm a rower and a pilot. I spend a good bit of time talking to other people who are one or the other. Offline and online, the people with whom I hang out have a passion for something; it may not be any of the things I care about myself, but I talk about the things I care about, and they listen; they talk about the things they care about, and I listen. And everyone is entertained and educated.