The word “interesting” cracks me up almost every time I hear someone say it. From my experience, it is rarely used as it is defined. The dictionary states that interesting means to hold one’s attention. For any of you who are artists, it means something entirely different.
Now I don’t know about you, but when someone tells me that something I just performed or created is interesting, he doesn’t mean that it is interesting at all. What he really means is one of several options:
1) It was crap.
2) It was crap but, I don’t want to hurt your feelings.
3) I don’t know what I think about it.
4) I don’t know what I think about it…probably crap.
5) Not interested.
6) I don’t really understand it and I don’t really care.
7) I don’t really understand it but, I don’t want you to know.
Look for this person to be eyeballing his watch and edging towards the door. If you haven’t lost total interest yet, you may be asking yourself why I find this so funny.
I realize that I state how interesting others are probably as much as I have been told it myself. I think it’s funny because I know that deep down, people squirm a little bit when something is interesting. It makes me smile because I think about how full circle we go when we express interest in each other. It proves that at least sometimes, we are considerate of other people’s feelings (at least to their face). A brazen and insincere declaration of interesting is also funny.
It reminds you of how you must produce something before you produce something good. It reminds you that the beauty with creation is often lies in the effort and not the final product. And it reminds you how funny your own imperfections can be.
If you made it to the end of this blog and found it to be a little “too” interesting, I apologize. I promise that next time will try to be far less so.
