Just finished watching The Return of the King. Another good movie, though one I’m not going to watch multiple times… Back to the Future is still my trilogy of choice. Yep.

Yesterday, at Andy’s, Nick tried to get me to talk more by asking about my one interest he knows about: anime. While I enjoy anime quite a bit, it just really doesn’t make for good conversation; how do you talk about Azumanga Daioh or Rahxephon (or anything, for that matter) with someone who knows nothing about the topic?

Nick’s (ultimately failed) attempt started me thinking, though: what are my interests, and how many of them are really things you can talk about? I enjoy ballroom dancing and tennis; I enjoy mucking around with HTML and CSS; I want to learn to edit video and program in Flash. None of these things am I terribly skilled at—but that’s OK, because they’re hobbies (or, for the latter ones, intended hobbies). None of them make for terribly engaging conversation, though. (I also stay relatively current with politics, but I tend to be more conservative than my friends… we can make a lot of conversation related to that, but I don’t know how fulfilling it would be for either side.)

On the other hand, I don’t tend to keep up with pop culture—so I wind up being the clueless one on the topics others can talk about.

Or—perhaps more honestly—it’s not so much what is talked about, but who is talking about it. I’ve never been that gifted at storytelling, and perhaps my reduced conversational skill is another effect of that.

The overall effect of this, regardless of the cause, is that it takes people a good while to get to know me—and until then they don’t have much of a reason to try. I seem to get along well with people once they have passed that barrier; I only know of one person who (to the best of my knowledge still) actively dislikes me*. (There are also those whose opinions of me are tainted by my lack of self-confidence, but they’re mostly dance follows from my earlier dancing days.) Truckers and movers also seem to have a natural affinity towards me, which I’m at a loss to explain.

[*I am generally clueless when it comes to social matters, so it may actually be that everyone hates me and I’m too stupid to see it. (I hope not.)]

Katie, a friend from earlier college days, was one of the few people (perhaps the only person) to have figured me out in a short period of time. She seemed not only to know who I was, but also appreciated me for what I was… and (as all people want to be understood and appreciated) she was precious to me, for that. We’ve fallen out of touch since she graduated, but I hope to catch up with her sometime in the future.