Kirstiecat | Blog

Last Friday, I had lunch after work at this place called The Soupbox, which is a local Chicago small business chain that sells some great both vegetarian friendly as well as non vegetarian soups. (In the summer, it turns into The Icebox and sells frozen fruit.) I was sharing an order of cream of broccoli in a bread bowl when I noticed a slightly entranced man in his late 20s-early 30s (I have no concept of age when I look at people but around there) who was visibly gawking at a playlist he had up on his computer. I started eating my soup and he started chatting up the girls behind the counter about a Daft Punk movie entitled Interstella 5555, which I haven’t seen myself. The girls looked disinterested as he labored over plot details involving a kidnapped alien rock band and erased memories.

Now, it’s always the geeky music fan that can’t help talking for hours about his favorite songs and albums that I find so endearing. But, I get the feeling that these girls did not find this guy as such because even though they weren’t overtly rude to him, there were some subtle clues of disinterest that he clearly wasn’t picking up on. He passionately gave his dissertation on the film for ten…maybe fifteen minutes in one stretch (He clearly didn’t need to stop for any breaths. He’d be a great swimmer.) When finally he paused, one of the girls said, “I was really just looking for a one word answer.” I hadn’t been around for the question…but I suppose it must have been something along the lines of “What soup would you like today?”

He went back to staring at his screen, memorizing notes and names of songs and lyrics…or perhaps just daydreaming about how many numbers of Pi you could fit into a standard rock chorus if you were to change all of the letters and words to strings of numbers. And then, for some reason, he turned back and needed that human contact again, even if it was just from a wall of apathy (with brown hair). “I could tell you more about the film” he said. “Can you just skip to the ending?” one of the girls asked.

I went up to him after eating my soup and talked to him about the film. I think anyone who has a real passion for something like music shouldn’t be treated with such a lack of interest.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 21st, 2006 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Awkward Conversations About Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.