I spoke to an interesting person today thanks to the only dating app I am on. Yes, I’m happy to let you guys know that now I am trying to be more comfortable with voice calls to get an understanding of a person sooner, than text endlessly into perdition. I call that progress, I call that mental evolution. Eh.
Either way, Yogi guy teaches film making and is a full time yoga enthusiast. He is also setting up an eco-community in a village with five of his friends. What is interesting is the way he described being there.
“In the village, it takes at least two, three days to detoxify from the city and adjust. But after that time, you feel rich.”
I wondered in what sense, thankfully he understood, “In the city, when you’re unhappy, you tend to either step out to eat somewhere, meet someone or buy something.” He was talking of rich in that sense, “In the village you actually feel like you have everything, like there is nothing you need anymore. So in the literal sense of the word rich.”
“So is this like a communal living system?” I asked.
“Yes, we have a farm, we intend to grow our own crop. We painted our own homes, divide all the work among four or five of us and yea.”
“That’s a very different life from the city.”
“It really is,” his voice is mellow, oddly like a sine wave going up and down, “It’s what I would like to do eventually, go and settle down there in the village, and maybe come to the city if need be, once a month, maybe lesser. There are certain challenges too like if we need certain supplies we have to drive a long way but it can be managed.”
We then moved onto discuss various books we were reading, or have read and what we thought about them. I can’t tell you how rare it is to find someone to talk about books with. Even among my close friends there’s currently only one bibliophile and she’s only into fiction so sometimes it gets restricted to just that. I also read a lot of fiction but sometimes a girl wants to discuss non-fiction books too.
I also spoke to another guy, but speaking to him has been the equivalent of talking to an entrepreneur trying to raise capital for his venture. Every single thing is a pitch about how great he is, how he believes in exclusivity and how gentlemanly he is. And all this pomposity in our first and second conversation. I also noticed that he tends to be selfish based on his own anecdotes and in a great deal of hurry to advance our conversation along, whatever that means. The thing with someone like that is, I have to spend a lot of energy setting boundaries, which isn’t a fun exercise if I have to do it every five minutes in a conversation. Everything was still tolerable until he asked me in the middle of our second conversation:
“Are you sensitive?”
There was by the way, no context to this. We weren’t discussing anything remotely close to this.
All this while, I had switched off the judgement mode. I did not want to strangle a conversation because I was noting down all the flaws and acting on them. I wanted to live with the flaws a bit to figure if they were actual deal breakers or my mind in overdrive. But when he asked me this question, the switch was on again.
“Sensitive as in?”
“You know if someone says something to you, do you like start crying or lock yourself up in the bathroom? I mean like not lock yourself up but yea, you know does it hurt you a lot if someone says something harsh to you?” he expounded on this, leaving me more and more nonplussed.
“That’s a funny question,” I said, half amused at the idea of me locking myself in washrooms a lot because I was upset. The other half was irritated at the time I now had to waste on such a question.
“Yea, it is isn’t it?” he conceded, “You know whenever I have asked this question, I never thought it was odd until you said ‘as in?’.”
Dear God, I should help him, no, I should help the others he’d ask this question to.
“Back when I was in advertising, we used to do a lot of research where we had to ask questions to figure out the audience’s needs and wants. This is what is called a bad question in research. You never ask such questions directly in that manner. You use other methods to ascertain this. That’s because most people don’t know these answers about themselves. It’s like if I ask, ‘Are you a good person?’ what would you say? There are some instances in which you would do the conventionally accepted ‘good’ thing, other times not so much. But even so you’d be tempted to say you perhaps are a good person, would that be true though? Would you know if you really are a good person? Most importantly, would I get the answer I require by asking such a question? Like in my case, if I had to answer this, I’d say that if someone on the street was to say something to me, I wouldn’t care much, but if someone close to me said something hurtful of course I’d be upset. But that’s pretty much everyone. So what does the answer get us?”
“Whoa, that went really deep,” he chuckled. He knew something about this had upset me. So we moved on quickly from there.
Perhaps because it was a stupid question, no, more than that, it was a lazy question.
You gauge this about a person over time, you notice this about someone. If you want me to serve you the theory of my personality in bite-sized pieces that you won’t even bother to chew, then that’s not going to happen. I am not going to be doing the work for you. Maybe I am being too harsh, or maybe I’m seeing his behaviour in the context of all the other things that have ticked me off. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look like it will work.
insearchofthebeautiful 