What are you curious about?
I was born with an exceptional amount of curiosity. An inconvenient amount, in fact. When I was a child, I had to be shamed into not asking personal questions or snooping in drawers. Luckily, I have grown up to constrain myself from my urge to know.
And I do have an urge to know everything. Curiosity is just one of the tools we have to learn about the world, and it’s a great thing for scientific inquiry. But my curiosity about the minutiae of daily life could get annoying quickly, particularly when it comes to medical stuff.
For example, I read the obituaries trying to find out how people died. Memorials provide this information, unless the family of the deceased want memorials to be given to the Humane Society or the decedent’s Alma mater, in which case my inquisitiveness is frustrated.
I am a frequent victim of clickbait. A headline like “Hollywood Star Falls Victim to Rare Disease”? I don’t know who the Hollywood star is, nor care, but I want to know all about the disease. I admit that ordinary gossip does little for me, but that rare disease? I’m there. (Note: it’s usually something like diabetes, not a rare disease.)
I resist the more rude parts of my curiosity, like asking someone why they went to the hospital. But I am forever, embarrassingly curious.
Sometimes my curiosity has its benefits. I am on my first day of moulage for New York Hope, making people up to look like human casualties of an inland hurricane. It helps to know what an open fracture, a bruised spleen, or a case of cholera look like from the outside. I’d show you a picture, but we’d have some people getting ill.
Words Like Me 