By Request: Five Questions

These five questions come from connikins over on Livejournal. As they are nice small questions (rather than Things that take me a few hundred words and therefore a period of weeks to cover), they jump the queue. To hell with continuity. According to the rules I am supposed to ask five questions of anyone who asks me to. I kind of hope nobody does.

1. If none of the clothing in your wardrobe was allowed to be black (or a dark enough shade that it is pretty much indistinguishable from black), what colour would your wardrobe predominantly be?

Grey. Wearing white stresses me out and no other colour is sufficiently neutral. I really dislike wearing blue, and while green is my favourite colour (and I like wearing it) I think it would be a bit too weird for me to wear mostly green most of the time.

2. Are you a music elitist? How do you deal with other people having vastly different music tastes to you?

I don't think I'm a music elitist at all. I used to be. I looked down my nose at music that I didn't get anything out of, especially anything I could decry as shallow and packaged. A few additional years have improved my ability to tell the difference between my subjective opinion and objective truth, as well as teaching me to appreciate a wider variety of sounds and styles.

I tend to be really happy¹ when people that I admire or get along with share my taste in music, and a little bit sad when they don't, but people whose tastes are vastly different to mine are fine by me. There are certain things we are unlikely to be able to share, that's all.

While I am given to saying things like "anybody who doesn't like The National has something wrong with them", the defect I refer to is "being insufficiently identical to me". That is really not something I can hold against anybody.

The other day at work I saw a guy trying to buy Britney Spears tickets on eBay. I knew he had seen her perform recently, and said something like "more Britney tickets, huh?" He braced for ridicule - and, indeed, someone nearby overheard and began to make fun of him - but I had just been making conversation. As I said at the time, if one of my favourite artists was playing in Melbourne you can bet I'd be after tickets.

3. If you only knew a person in passing, what do you primarily judge their personality on? (eg. How they dress, how they talk?) How do you judge if they're worth knowing or not?

That's a hard question to answer, although it's something I actually think about a fair bit.

Part of the problem is that I really don't tend to "judge" people, or categorise them as "worth knowing/not worth knowing". If I observe someone behaving in a way that I find really unpleasant I'm likely to divert my attentions elsewhere, and if it turns out that their interests and values lack any appreciable common ground with mine I will probably not pursue closer acquaintanceship, but I really appreciate the opportunities I get to interact with people who aren't necessarily "my type of person". (This is one of the reasons I like my current workplace so much.)

The thing is that I love people. I really like the way my initial sense of somebody gradually fills out and changes as I get to know them better. I'm rarely surprised by people, because I don't have a fixed idea of who they are supposed to be; I just accept that everything fits into their personal timeline, which I will never see all of. Stuff that I don't understand makes sense with context that I don't have, and every new bit of information leads to greater understanding.

I've wandered a fair way from the question, I know. It's very difficult to put my finger on what it is that attracts my interest. Part of it is an intuitive sense of commonality, I think; I've lost count of the number of times I've felt drawn to somebody, only to find out (days, weeks, months or years later) that we share a predilection or a perspective or a particular kind of formative experience. Another part of it is individuality; even complete strangers sometimes give off such a strong vibe of being themselves that I practically want to follow them home and listen to them tell their life story.

Back to the question again! I suspect that my strongest sense of someone's personality, especially if I know them only in passing, comes from non-verbal cues. Body language, facial expressions, small reactions to things going on around them. That doesn't tend to affect whether I want to know them or not, though, it just affects the ways I might interact with them.

4. Is insomnius a reference to having insomnia?

Sort of. When I was signing up for my Livejournal account a few years ago my sleeping patterns were in much worse shape than they are now. 'Insomnius' as a handle wasn't a direct reference to insomnia, but it was a collection of sounds that seemed to fit pretty well with the person I felt like at the time. I'm sure my general lack of sleep had something to do with that.

Since then I have used it for pretty much everything online, and for me it has become quite removed from any meaning other than 'me'. I get a bit surprised when people connect it with insomnia. Sometimes I wonder if I should use something else, but as a signifier it has become about as strong as my given name (which I would also struggle to change). Besides, having trouble sleeping seems likely to be a feature of my life for some time yet.

5. Do you remember that time you put the spoon in the cup?

Like it was yesterday. Oh, man. Good times.

1. Really, ridiculously happy. Sharing the music that provides so many of my life's superlative experiences is one of the best things there is. [↩]