Of This World

I fall in love too easily.  And not just with people.  Even more easily, I fall in love with stories, with concepts, with ideas.  I'm one of those people who is guilty of occasionally being more in love with the idea of a person than with that person.

Maybe it comes from not very much liking the tangible.  I've never followed fads or trends, material possessions have always had diminutive value for me.  The things I really wanted were all ideas.  Metaphors.  Concepts.  The first time I fell passionately in love was when I discovered genetics.  I was head over heels addicted, burying myself in textbooks for hours on end because I couldn't get enough.

I obsess over ideas and stories and details the way people obsess about well-written novels...except that this extends beyond the written word.  Especially lately, where I've found myself more and more falling in love with stories, with people's lives and thoughts and minds.  And the more I learn, the more I want to know and understand.

I saw a movie once which wasn't terribly good, per se, but a line stuck with me.  A woman had wanted to be a writer and so had become a stenographer, and she said (I paraphrase), "the more I worked, the more I realized that I loved hearing people's stories, and I didn't really have any of my own to tell."

When I was much, much younger, still in elementary school, I wrote a lot.  I wrote stories and they always had these bold protagonists who were special and extraordinary but had grown up not knowing this, their abilities repressed by their families and society.  And that's how I pictured myself.  Many years later, I understand now that it's a fairly common manifestation of the personal fable of adolescence to think that one is special and unique.

None of the stories were any good.  They were all too predictable because the characters were either flawless or had too many flaws to be realistic in the least.  I don't write fiction anymore, not really, anyway, because I don't know how to create stories that are believable.  The little bit of it I did in my creative writing class was based solidly in the things that were going on in my life at the time, and so was more a diary entry in story form than anything.

Thinking back, I don't think I took that class because I wanted to write.  I think I really took it because I wanted to read more people's writing.  I've met people who come off as boring and unimaginative, but whose writing is poignant and powerful in ways I could not have anticipated.  I love the depth that writing reveals about a person, the stories they tell and, especially, how they tell them.

In short, I fall in love with people's writing, thinking, ideas, concepts, blogs way before I fall in love with them.  Most of the people whose ideas I fall in love with I'll never even be friends with, some of them I dislike as people.  That doesn't stop me from being head over heels in love with the way they put down their thoughts. So I guess this whole post was really just a long rant about how much of a hopeless romantic I am when it comes to the intangibles.  That's okay, though.  Because it's true, and I like things that are.  I just wish I'd been able to phrase it better.