What gives something significance? I am watching the first Nebraska game of the season, and I'm having something of a hard time getting excited about it.
First, an apology and an explanation: from the word "and" in the previous sentence, I am actually writing some 24 hours later. I still know more or less what I was going to say, though, and want to get it down before I do anything else. Currently, I'm on a bus on the way to Longview, so I should have plenty of time.
I am watching this football game largely because Zelda enjoys football. I have never been terribly excited by sports and even now as I try to become so I am having difficulty. I find this very peculiar. I, Kevin, who can get adrenaline pumping from rapidly clicking a retracting ballpoint pen. Why is it that I can ascribe significance to some arbitrarily insignificant thing and become ridiculously excited but still find incredible mental resistance to doing the same thing to something most people are drawn to naturally?
Hm. An interruption on the bus. It segues naturally into what I was going to cover next but I don't want it to seem that it caused the thought. Interesting. I suppose I do write to some imagined audience, though it isn't generally the visitors to my web site - if indeed there are any regular "attenders". But it doesn't matter, I suppose, how I write this now. The reader has been told that the following point was conceived before its connected incident.
Zelda isn't the only reason I'm attempting to take an interest in football. It is a general social thing, and it is good to have something in common with people for conversation. It is part of the whole "networking" thing - Oh, the incident on the bus. Some guy just came to the driver to ask if the TV sets on the bus were operational, and upon receiving an affirmative answer asked if we could watch "the game". I assume it was a football game. This man is a good example of someone excited about sports. And I am fairly sure that he is not the only one on the bus who is disappointed that we will not be watching. Indeed, his behavior made it rather clear that he assumed a majority of the bus [passengers] would enjoy it. And the truth, I suspect, is that this was a perfectly valid assumption.
A thought struck me when I mentioned the networking aspects of sports. While I was on the football team at Central Christian, I remember one of the guys talking with me about why he - and others from his caste (the sportsy group, I suppose) - liked me. It was that I was "superior to us, but not above us". At least, that is the phrase he settled on when I helped him rearrange the words a little. Which I suppose is kind of ironic, though it didn't occur to me at the time - I was merely helping him find words to say what he meant - once I gathered just what that was, that is. I did feel a little flattered by it. But perhaps that rather innocent semantic assistance is a good example of what he was thanking me for - almost an ironic irony, which makes it much tastier.
I have begun to notice, though, what is perhaps a certain amount of stuffiness in my writing. "Innocent semantic assistance" could probably be rewritten in a more layman way without much difficulty, but I decided not to exert that minimal effort. I suppose, in a way, that is a good thing, because it means I'm not worrying about my audience so much, but it does disturb me a little. I'm sure I do not actually think internally with such words, so in a way I'm dressing my language a bit. But, then, "entity" thought doesn't use lay words, either. Perhaps I should simply be grateful for a reasonably succinct lexicon and leave it at that. Kevin, you did it again. "Reasonably succinct lexicon". And you didn't even use "lexicon" in its real sense! Sigh.