| I posted this on Facebook, but I figured the good folk of PUAF could make use of it, too.
I have a buddy who is afraid that he’s deep like a baking pan. His most recent interaction with the ladies has left him feeling that he’s uninteresting and that what you see on his outside is what you get on the inside. I don’t really think that’s true, but I did decide to share with him some of what I think makes a person interesting, and now I’ve decided to share it with all of you.
People are made interesting by doing stuff. Usually, the most interesting stuff you’ve done is the stupid stuff. If you want to surprise other people, you need to surprise yourself, and that often means taking a risk or doing something that you would normally never do. I seem interesting to a lot of people because I’ve done a lot of different things in my life: I’ve been homeless; I made a lot of money selling timeshare; I sold puppies for a while; I’ve attempted suicide a bunch of times; I made pitas professionally; I’ve been a baker, a dishwasher, a cook. And sometimes, I do really weird shit. I learned to pick up girls in my mid-twenties from a book and some practice. I became polyamorous, which was a strange choice for me because I’m obviously pretty bad at it. Hell, the only reason I’m in Edmonton at all is because I followed a girl here, and that ended in flames and nastiness.
But all of these things have gathered together to create a life story that is diverse and sort of weird. If you want to be interesting, sometimes you have to do really stupid shit. In fact, you should probably _consistently_ do really stupid shit for a while.
When you’re young, you have a license to do the stupid. I mean this as much as I can mean anything: when you are young, you are supposed to do really stupid things. It’s how we learn, it’s how we grow, and when we’re establishing ourselves as people in our late teens and early twenties, it’s really important to fail at a bunch of stuff. And let’s face it, we don’t want to fail at the important stuff. We want to fail at stuff that doesn’t matter, and that usually means doing something stupid, failing at it, and then finding some other stupid thing to do. Some, like me, take it to a strange extreme where they do a lot of really important stupid shit, but I’m not suggesting that you need to take it that far. Just be willing to experiment and try things you haven’t done before.
I mean, think about all of the boring people you know. Everyone knows some boring people. How many cool stories can they tell you about that time they jumped off the hay bale and gave a flying elbow to a cop car? None. Because they’ve played it safe, and they haven’t done anything that’s really worth doing. They haven’t taken stupid risks, they’ve never lost everything, they’ve never really gained anything, and they’re just sitting around waiting for the world to happen to them.
And here’s the big thing, here’s the kicker: Doing these stupid things reveals your character, tells you who you are. It provides depth to your character. You don’t become interesting just because you punched a hobo to death at terminal velocity that one time. You become interesting because of what that says about who you are. You are a different person because of that event than you would have been without having experienced it.
And I’m not saying you have to do stuff that’s totally balls-to-the-wall-stupid. Just… Take risks. Do things you wouldn’t do. Test yourself against the world and see what impressions the world leaves on your soul. Move out. Change the way you dress for six months. Get a different job, something that’s totally unrelated to what you know. Talk to strangers. Experiment, do the dumb, take risks, and learn.
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Repent now and save 50% on your next divine judgment.
-Monkey's Little Brother, Spud
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CHAT
I kinda do so in a way, but it can come across as bragging.
