It Turns Out I Could Actually Not Care Much Less

I’m finally coming to terms with a few things I’ve always been vaguely ashamed of not liking more than I do.

I don’t care much about music. It’s not that I don’t like it. I have a massive iTunes library and wacky taste – today I listened to Haydn on my way in to work and Biggie on my way home. I’ve probably been to a hundred concerts – everything from dive bar to record-company preview to festival to opera to orchestra to arena – and some are truly awesome memories. But I can’t remember one show that I didn’t wish was shorter. Music is peripheral to me, and it seems like it’s life-essential to a lot of people. I got in an argument once about having to choose whether to be deaf or blind (why do hypotheticals always start arguments?) and I chose deaf without hesitation. No writing? No art? No sunsets? No BOOKS?

I care even less about team sports. I understand them at least mostly. I like watching a game if I’m with somebody who’s into it. I’ll even have fun in a pickup game, albeit disastrously badly. But I could be perfectly happy for the rest of my life not knowing what city the Nets play in, how many games over 500 the Yankees are, who’s in the NFC playoffs, etc.

I care even less than that for cities. Having grown up on a lake, unschooled and spending time running around in the woods, cities were a novelty and my twenties were spent in them. I think that was reactionary. Then I had a couple of failed relationships with city-dwellers. So this is probably reactionary too, at least in part, but I’m so over urban life. It’s claustrophobic and depressing and overstimulating and the ugliness is painfully visceral. I need trees.

I wonder – do you suppose there are a lot of so-called popular interests that other people don’t really care much for?