Bores

It's like my common musical statement: it's better to be really bad than to just be bland.

Poster X/Poster Y? Who are you on abt tom?

xoxo

I'm not talking about contrarians or irritants, Ally, I'm talking about, i dont know, somebody who is an airbus-spotter against somebody with no hobbies or interests at all.

Actually I fear tone of voice might have an awful lot to do with this. And leaping about. if you leap about you are interesting I think. Realistically I think I never being boring.

Or at least I am never being bored.

Opinions can be catapaulted from dullsville based on volume and passion. Folks like this are the equivalent of the Hollywood blockbuster - fun to watch at first, but run out of steam ultra- quick. People with bland opinions are a chore to deal with, but at least they're easy to ignore / pass over, should the need arise. The loud, obnoxious bastards never shut up, unfortunately, which often causes me to fight the temptation to arrange a meeting between the toe of my shoe and the delta of their crotch.

The thing I find most boring is people who feel the over-arching NEED to prove that they're intelligent by speaking about academic minutiae at inappropriate times (for example: citing page numbers from physics texts while I'm trying to pour myself a beer from the keg, and I wish to GOD I was making that particular one up). Intellectual debate is great and I understand that some people really thrive on it, but we all know that there are people out there who use it as a security blanket to make themselves feel like they're the smartest person in the room and to keep people from approaching them on more human, universal terms.

Here's a better example; the good way and bad way of working knowledge you have into conversations:

GOOD: "Independence Day" was hella annoying. Based onthat movie, strippers can do anything and Apple computers can hack into advanced alien technology. Nope, can't suspend my belief that far. (cue laughter; someone buys the speaker a pint)

BAD: "Independence Day" was a joke of a movie. Are we seriously supposed to believe that a Powerbook running at 733 megahertz can compile a trojan horse virus written in C++ capable of incapacitating an unknown operating system? They both just happen to run the MIPS instruction set, huh? (Cue studied frowns and head nods; someone gets up from the table and looks for a more entertaining conversation)

STOP TRYING SO HARD. Your intelligence will come through in the way you speak, how quickly you pick up on what other people say, and the manner in which you defend your viewpoints (as well as how you address other people's viewpoints). Flinging around facts and quoting famous people makes you look like you spent all day chained to a textbook.

(blub) therefore I am boring!

(exits, head held low)

xoxo

People bore me when they go into too much unecessary detail about something. Although I'm probably prone to this too.

The good thing about this is that if a post gets boring you can just scan past things but then you miss things like the original mention of 'delta of your crotch'

I'm probably not explaining myself very well. I think you can be well- read and work it into casual conversation without doing it in such a manner that people could produce a fully annotated bibliography for your portion of the bar discussion. And clearly, if someone asks a specific question about something you know or have read, not answering is silly. I just think it's boring to parrot back facts/opinions/data from their source without spending any effort shaping it towards the conversation at hand and your personality.

Lord knows I can be boring. Lord knows I can try and prove to others I am oh-so-informed in order to make me seem cool. Yes, I can be pathetic. *mopes, for real* I don't know quite what's louder in my brain, my rampaging ego or my relentlessly self-deprecating/demolishing side.

The Focault thing interested me, for instance, and I'd like to read more (however they probably don't publish a 'Focault for the djam fool bwoy')

(PLEASE NOTE: I AM ONLY HAVING A LAUGH. DO NOT FEEL THE NEED TO PLACATE OR SOOTHE MY ANGST. THANK YOU. Just so you notice this statement - DELTA OF YOUR CROTCH.)

Re: boredom by academia - I used to think it was the fault of the listeners for not being as smart as me (cue self-depricating shrug), but Dan's write - it's the job of the communicator to tailor the message to the needs of the audience. But NEVER sacrifice charm & humor at the expense of your personality - that's never good. Everyone loses.

If there's anything worse than watching someone go completely against their personality ("fake it") just to fit into a crowd, then let me know so I can gouge out my eyes.

1. Tom E mentioned CONTENT. The thing is, some things are boring to me, or to you, or whatever. I'd get bored if people were going on about stuff I didn't understand: eg, physics, 'Reality TV', American football, hip-hop, whatever. But when I say 'bored' I mean, in a way, 'annoyed'.

2. The flip-side of this is that SOME PEOPLE CAN BE INTERESTING EVEN ABOUT THINGS YOU'D NORMALLY FIND BORING. There are a few people on these fora whom I would read with interest even if they were writing about stuff like the above. (They know who they are. Don't they?)

3. [Extension of point 2:] Maybe being in love = not finding your beloved boring, whatever he / she talks about. He / she is always endlessly fascinating to me. I could listen to him / her on nuclear fission for hours. La la la.

I agree with you though, just because something is boring to you doesn't make it boring per se and it depends on how it's being said and who is saying it. I don't really think being boring has anything to do with content (a question I missed embedded in Tom's, oops). I honestly don't. It has to do with how you present it, how you can convey it to other people. I mean, let's face it, think back to school, what classes were your favorites? I doubt it was wholly because the class was just so intrinsically interesting to you that a dead whale could've taught it and you'd have been happy, right?

Content is nothing, they say people only pay 10% of their attention to content anyhow.

Hooray! You've just reminded me of the only other thing I could remember about 'V' 5 minutes after finishing it. They all say '..wha?' all the time. I looked for... ooh minutes on the internet for an excerpt that had that word in it.

I have to say first that I LOVE ILE and M. People getting the wrong end of the stick is an occupational hazard on boards but for the most part everyone here is really interesting and engaging. Obviously I think this, otherwise why would I be inviting everyone onto my roof on Saturday? I'm a sucker for a withering one-liner (too, too much watching of All About Eve and brittle comedies, etc) and I think the women on this bitch in particular excel at this. You're all smart and I never feel like a goon around you. And stand up and take a bow, Ally, for implanting the Ally-ese language virus directly to my cerebral cortex, yo. As for the guys, I've been amused to the point of tears by Anthony, Dan, Epicure Ed, anyone called Nick, DG, the Marks, Ned, Pete, Patrick, Paul, Tom and, well, basically all of you at one point or another.

I think we're having fun here. Let's not let a couple of blips distract us from that.

Bores = people who can never surprise me. That's rare in the world (for me): a lot less rare in reading/writing, cuz so much is bought by the yard — I stopped buying newspapers when I knew everything they were going to say, but in two/three years I will know very little they are going to say. There's only been one likely candidate on ILM/E: and actually even he — playing a pseudonymous role and a very narrow role — has a few times genuinely surprised me. Making me laugh = surprising me, obviously. New ways to warp language = surprising me (I'm the worst magpie on the twin boards). Watching as someone changes their mind = big hit of crack for me: now they're wide open, how FAR CAN THEY GO?

Rule for self as a writer/lecturer: they're paid for a performance, give em more than they bargained for. Does it add up logically? Is it true? Who cares? Was it fun? THAT matters. My terror of being boring is dwarfed by my terror of being bored. Like anyone easily caught in obsessions I can be VERY boring.

Humph.

This is what I mean by "invade my head": in order to research P3, I went on the web to STUDY what Ash, Misty, Brock and Prof.Oak (also Team Rocket, obv.) were called in OTHER COUNTRIES (inc. Japan itself). So now I have a folder of downloads of lists several hundred poke-names, as per Jap and Eng versions. The ppl have v.ordinary Jap names (Misty = Kazumi, I think), but the pokes are fascinating.

= boring, of course, in what Duana calls the RW.

Mark S also said, in effect: don't bother if it adds up - just make it fun. Again, I sort of agree - believe me, I do - but I think you're underestimating the value of making stuff add up sometimes. The hard part, possibly, is doing both together. Is it?

I respond to that point, btw, cos I was recently trying to articulate why I don't like most of Jacques Derrida's work. I have been accused of not liking it cos it's too arty / speculative / relativistic / whatever (you know, standard 'Anti-anti-pomo' rhetoric), the inverse implication being that I was a kind of Bulldog character who wanted everything down to earth. I wanted to explain why this is not true. Thus:

YES, I dislike JD's work (most of it - I should avoid generalizing too much here) because it doesn't tell me 'the truth' - it doesn't 'add up' - in short, I don't find it ENLIGHTENING.

BUT I would be happy to accommodate it along with tons of other things I love if it did the things they do: if it made you think differently and newly (Barthes) and did so wittily (Wilde); if it danced around language and cliche with unstoppable humour (Myles); if it was true to some of the textures of life (Woolf, O'Hara) or impressive (Yeats) just gorgeous (Fitzgerald). The reason I don't like most of JD's work is not so much that it doesn't tell me the truth, but that it doesn't do for me any of those other things that good writing can do either.

Total tangent - but I hope that Mark S can see the relevance. Jeez, I hope *I* can.

Didn't Jack Kerouac talk about this sort of thing in The Subterraneans? "They know all about Ezra Pound and Chinese literature but don't talk about it"--something like that. Which was probably based on his own experiences. I read somewhere--think it was in Rexroth--that he once came into a room full of his bohemians friend and announced he had converted to Zen Buddhism only to find out that just about everyone else in the room but him, understood an Asian language and had more knowledge of Asian traditions. How about that? Nice talking to you.

(Think about this: I am interested in people, but women much more often than men. That probably has a good deal to do with sexual attraction, but I'm not sure it can be completely reduced to that.)

OMG, this is so me. It's like, "I'm not actually going to listen to you unless you contribute to my intellectual advancement."