The Gentle News

In ninth grade I started taking German classes. I took it all four years. I know why I started — my dad had taken it, from the same teacher, and always told neat stories about Herr Dunn — but the reasons I took four years of high school German are numerous and mostly uninteresting.

There was this girl. We’ll call her CJ. I’d had a crush on her since 6th grade, and she was a year older. I had know idea she took German until I decided to show up for the German club, which held meetings at the “Senior” campus. The Senior campus happened to be about a mile from my house, and the Ninth Grade campus was about 500 light-years across town. I was amazed and a little stunned to find CJ in German Club. She wasn’t exactly a debutant or anything, but her friends were several notches above mine in the popularity food chain.

I don’t remember how it went down, but I ended up being President of the German Club, at least one or two years. We ate food and watched movies. That’s what the German Club did. Sometimes the movies were German. I made wiener schnitzel. Sort of. It was fun, and it was interesting. I cared about almost everyone in the club.

At some point CJ picked up on the fact that this nerdy sometimes-friend of hers dug her chili. Even after my messy confession of such, and the revelation that I was cool enough to seek friendship but not attractive enough to seek a whole lot else, we were about as close as an honest nerd and his unrequited soul mate could be. Lots of emails and IMs, rarely initiated by me.

I remember one night, Junior year, when we were EyeYimming pretty feverishly. Talking about Indigo Girls or J. D. Salinger or some other thing I found amusing but not all that enlightening. I found a puddle of courage and asked her out. We then had a long discussion about the difference between not caring about someone and not being interested.

The explication wasn’t as direct or literal as this, but in a few thousand words she was able to genuinely convey that she agaped the hell out of me, but erosed none of me. It certainly wasn’t my first rejection, but to this day it’s my favorite.

After high school, we saw each other once a year when our paths crossed, but the emails were fairly steady. The last time I remember talking to her was sometime around the wedding in 2006. I think she and a friend came to our house for a party. I don’t remember, and either it was all conducted via IM and phone, or there’s a gap in my email archive.

Polyamory and polygamy are not complicated subjects for me. They don’t work. If they work for you, great, but they don’t work. For me, for you, or for anybody. I’m interested in hearing about it, but I don’t care enough to hear about it directly from you. They don’t work, and I’d much rather learn what little I’m interested in second-hand. As in, on TV and in books. Not from your LiveJournal, and not from your blog. If you throw some of it in the middle of a post about HD content or nomadic freelancing, then yeah, I’ll probably read it.

I think that’s respectful, don’t you? I’m a little interested, and I don’t care.

Another sometimes-friend, whom I used to work with, used to spark long email threads ostensibly in the name of philosophical intrigue, but with the ultimate goal of showing me that Jesus was really the son of God, really lived and died and lived a couple millenia ago, and really can keep me out of that hot, black casino downstairs if I just close my eyes and see him. The last of these conversations, to give him the final word, ended like this:

“Fair enough. The problem with churches is you really don’t know who
the true believers are.  The bible talks about sheep & goats and wheat
& tares, and the process of sorting all that out.  If you’re not
familiar with those principles, church can look pretty messy from the
outside.”

That was in May. Just this past Friday, he invited me to see a funk cover band play at his church, which happens to be less than a mile from my house. I said, in so many words, thanks for the invite, but when Funk is your job, and Job’s just a book, spending your Friday night sipping light refreshments at a new-age church to see some middle-aged heavy water down your bread and butter isn’t all that appealing. Laugh with the sinners, etc.

If I ever enjoy a Funk show without getting my drink (or at least my sequined vest) on, that’s the day it’s really time for me to get a new band together.

People throw the word science around too much. Whatever they’re interested in is, somehow, science, but whatever they don’t care about is either not science or it’s just altogether stupid. When someone says “I’m a man of science” or “I’m a scientific person” in the company of people who are transparently unmotivated by superstition or hocus pocus, there’s a good chance he or she cares very little about actual science. In reality, the person is probably just trying to compensate for being uninteresting.