Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Not-Interesting apparently leads to Interesting

I lifted this from no-blog-rachel’s blog




You Are 92% Interesting



Believe it or not, you are a very fascinating person.

You're probably too busy being interesting to realize exactly how interesting you are.



You have a rich, full life. You are curious about the world, and you are very open to new experiences.

You have a lot to talk about, and people find you to be an amazing conversationalist.



And most importantly, you are truly interested in other people. How could anyone find that boring?

You truly listen and learn from others. You're not self absorbed or shallow.



Heh. What’s really funny is, it wasn’t always like that for me. Great Googly-Moogly, no. Fifteen years ago…well, now I’ve got to go take it again real quick…oh yeah…yeah…here we go…Tama, fifteen years ago:




You Are 36% Interesting



Truth be told, you're not the most interesting person in the world.

You don't put much effort into expanding your horizons. You're content to stay in your little comfort zone.



You tend to get stuck in a rut, and you often bore people who spend time with you.

You are predictable and somewhat narcissistic. You're too focused on yourself to see how boring you can be.



You have the potential to be an incredibly fascinating person. You just have to be a little more proactive.

Shake things up. Try something new. Take a risk. The worst that can happen is that you'll have an amazing story to tell!



Oooooooh, snap! But pretty true, too. It was right around that time, give or take a year or two, that I had one of Those Moments, when suddenly you realize that you are Just. Plain. WRONG, about a lot of things.

The greatest of these wrong notions was my impression regarding my own relative importance in the grand scheme of things.

You can imagine the system-shock brought on by realizing that the earth, sun, moon and stars did not, in fact, revolve around me and what I {thought, felt, wanted, did with my weekend}.

Once I realized my own lack of earth-shattering profundity, well, suddenly…other people and new notions got a lot more important.

Amazing how that works. You realize you don’t have the most fasssssscinating story on the planet, well, by golly…somebody must…

Maybe I should try listening to that old lady who sidles up to me at the supermarket and tries to engage me in conversation. Is that a can of cat treats I’m buying? Why yes, yes it is…do you like cats, ma’am…? {twenty minute aria about the cats she has known and loved and how, back in the Depression, her father gave her a whipping for feeding her precious kitten a piece of ham}

Maybe I should try getting my head out of my own, uh, space, and see what some other realities look like. Go see things, accept invitations to parties, take the risk that the other person is, in fact, a little crazy, or wrong-headed, or damaged goods, or otherwise, well, Not Like Me.

Really jump on into Life, and see what-all it’s got. I don’t have the answers, but they’ve got to be out there somewhere, right?

I’m not that interesting. I just putter around trying to keep up with the modern world I’ve found myself in. Eat, work, sleep, eat, work, sleep…that’s pretty much it.

But Life surely is interesting, and endlessly so…so full of color and sound and scent and emotion and heights and depths of the living experience…sometimes I can find myself positively floored by the shifting depths of a purple skein of yarn, or charmed to my core by a child’s laughter floating through the air, or flattened by unspeakable sorrow when I hear of tragedies beyond bearing…and borne up again by tales of victories against all odds.

Weird to think that realizing how wrong I was to think I was ever interesting might have led to actually becoming interesting (if free online quizzes are to be believed), in spite of the fact that I don't really care about being interesting anymore because, hello, lots of things are so much more interesting than I could ever hope to be...and I'm far more interested in hearing about them than running around wearing a sign that says, "Hello, my name is Interesting!"

Allllllrighty, then. Right. This has been another episode of Tama takes a very simple thing and somehow makes it more complex than quantum physics. Tune in next time, when I’ll decide that toilet paper is actually a metaphor for Spiritual Awakening…

(Sigh…sadly, I wouldn’t put it past me…)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love this. I think you just gave a very good description of what "growing up" really means - realizing that the world doesn't revolve around you. Some folks never make it, and that's sad. They miss out on a lot.