I Kind of Had a Point, But Then I Started Talking About Geology

I've been thinking a lot about love lately.
There's lots of different kinds of love--there's love, and then there's love; love, but also Love.
I love dinosaur chicken nuggets, but I love my cats. I Love humanity some days, but on others, I love them.

It's complicated. (So saith my Facebook relationship status.)

I love the things that I love by default, I suppose, because they move me in some way. Like language, for example. I love language because it's so simultaneously infinite and limited. It's primary, it's prolific, and yet sometimes, it doesn't matter at all. All the words in the world can't achieve what a simple touch or look can. Collectively, we probably have a word for every emotion that has ever been felt, but when you're in that moment, words simply can't describe what it is that you're feeling in every facet of your being.
And I think that's pretty neat.
But it's easy for me to love the things that I love (except when they wake me up with a hurk hurk hurk SPLAT at four AM), that I don't often think about the things that other people love. And I think you really miss out on the world when you can't see the beauty of something through someone else's eyes.

Take, for instance, geology.
Did you know people get PhDs in that shit? Literally. You can be a doctor. In rocks. And sediment. (Even soil!)
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy
What I see as unearthly (hee) boring (and sometimes pretty, depending on the level of shiny), someone else sees as beautiful and fascinating. They can tell me where the rock lives, how long it's been living, what's been living (or not living, as is more often the case) in it, whether or not it's igneous or metamorphic or that other one I forgot the name of.
And just like my eyes light up when I'm going on and on about the Seven Ages of the English language or Buffy or my cats, so do the eyes of the people who like shit that I think is boring. And I can see their love and their passion, it's palpable, and even though I'm probably still bored because it's still a rock, in that moment, I feel how they feel and I really can't describe how I feel other than "warm and fuzzy inside."

When someone has the ability to show you what makes something special, what sets it apart from all the other things, I think that's really a gift. So the next time I'm blathering on about the cute thing that my cat did or the Great Vowel Shift, remember...I'm a fucking gem, get used to it.