Well, that’s one of the things friends are supposed to do, expand each others’ horizons. I don’t expect to like everything all my friends like, but I figure that I’ll like some of it, so if they expose me to enough stuff I’ll still wind up finding stuff I like that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Lisa, my oldest friend, who I’ve known for almost 25 years, is a big fan of James Joyce. I’ve never read a page of Joyce in my life, and don’t expect to anytime soon, and if I do read any it’ll likely be something like Dubliners, and not the stuff Lisa really gets off on like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. She and her boyfriend mnemex are always talking about things they’re into that I’m not, or am only marginally interested in, like fencing or the SCA or filking (the last of which is nowadays a very marginal pursuit of mine; it used to be more of one), but I don’t for a moment think of them as people I don’t have much in common with. Chris, who I’ve been dating for over a decade, is way into baseball, which I don’t care a whit for, and has barely read any comics ever (not even Watchmen) nor played any RPGs (she tried it once and didn’t like it), but I don’t think of her as someone I don’t have much in common with. And Lisa, Josh, and Chris don’t think of Kevin and I as someone they don’t have much in common with when we go on at length about all the weird comics we read that they’ve never heard of.
The workplace comic, Through the Habitrails (by Jeff Nicholson, who currently does Colonia — you knew that, right?), is supposed to be creepy (though “Kafkaesque” is the descriptor that comes to my mind). Parts of it were originally published in the horror comics anthology Taboo, and I thought they were the scariest thing in there. This is one of those basic personality things, I think. In my experience, some people just don’t like reading about negative experiences (and the types of experiences vary; some people are fine with physical horror but can’t take psychological, for example), while others are capable of mentally encapsulating the experience as fiction and maintaining psychological distance from it. In my case, I was slaving away at Sir Speedy when I read “It’s Not Your Juice” the first part of Habitrails to see print, about the guy getting something in the mail that gives him “juice” (a creative charge), and then having the juice literally tapped away over the course of the workday, leaving him with none for his own projects, I thrummed like a tuning fork someone had just hit. Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly I thought. I think reading that comic may have contributed to my quitting that awful job.
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Re: Having stuff in common
Date: 2002-06-10 10:35 am (UTC)Well, that’s one of the things friends are supposed to do, expand each others’ horizons. I don’t expect to like everything all my friends like, but I figure that I’ll like some of it, so if they expose me to enough stuff I’ll still wind up finding stuff I like that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Lisa, my oldest friend, who I’ve known for almost 25 years, is a big fan of James Joyce. I’ve never read a page of Joyce in my life, and don’t expect to anytime soon, and if I do read any it’ll likely be something like Dubliners, and not the stuff Lisa really gets off on like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake. She and her boyfriend
The workplace comic, Through the Habitrails (by Jeff Nicholson, who currently does Colonia — you knew that, right?), is supposed to be creepy (though “Kafkaesque” is the descriptor that comes to my mind). Parts of it were originally published in the horror comics anthology Taboo, and I thought they were the scariest thing in there. This is one of those basic personality things, I think. In my experience, some people just don’t like reading about negative experiences (and the types of experiences vary; some people are fine with physical horror but can’t take psychological, for example), while others are capable of mentally encapsulating the experience as fiction and maintaining psychological distance from it. In my case, I was slaving away at Sir Speedy when I read “It’s Not Your Juice” the first part of Habitrails to see print, about the guy getting something in the mail that gives him “juice” (a creative charge), and then having the juice literally tapped away over the course of the workday, leaving him with none for his own projects, I thrummed like a tuning fork someone had just hit. Yes, that’s it, that’s it exactly I thought. I think reading that comic may have contributed to my quitting that awful job.