Day 15 Reflection: Curiosity

I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with my curiosity.

This probably has to do with the fact that, at the age of seven, I got caught going through the drawers of a buffet at my friend’s house. I wanted to know if all buffets were catchalls for stuff like the one at my house, and what kind of clutter my friends’s parents collected. I seriously didn’t know I did anything wrong. (That was a lot of my childhood, getting yelled at for things I had never been told were wrong.)

As a adult, I’m still very curious. Most of the time I save my curiosity for the most appropriate things, like research: “How much debt do college students have? How do they feel about it?” Or writing: “What would Luke Dunstan do in this situation?”

But then there’s the rubbernecking at accidents. The burning desire to ask personal questions. The gleaning of details on the Internet about teens dying of suicide and celebrity nervous breakdowns and the manifesto of the New Zealand shooter. I am not proud of myself for these, because with each click on such articles, I vote for privacy to be invaded and websites to post hate.

I suspect that curiosity is hardwired in the brain as a mechanism to protect one from harm — if I know what caused the accident, I will avoid the same fate. If I know the motivation of the mass murderer, I will spot the next one before he attacks. The truth of the matter, though, is that fate is capricious enough that no amount of information can guarantee safety. So I keep the personal questions at a minimum and only to the people closest to me, and I drive on when I see the accident.

Curiosity, they say, killed the cat — but satisfaction brought it back. Sometimes we never get satisfaction, and that’s okay as long as we don’t try to get it at any cost.

Hi! Help me understand!

I would like to know who my readers are! Don’t worry; it’s a very short (five minute or less) survey.

I can see where you might not want to tell me who you are if, say, you were my secret admirer or you were a foreign operative who’s investigating my blogs for coded information (I’m talking to you, Russia Bot!) so I will not ask your names. Like all reader surveys, no harm is expected from taking this survey.

The survey can be found here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/WSVXHGR

Thank you!

The explosion of visits yesterday — I’m curious.

Yesterday’s post hit 173 readers, which is three times the average amount of reads I get for a post!

Thank you, everyone! Please come back!

I wish I knew who all of you were so I could thank you personally.

I wonder how many of you are people I know and how many people came to visit for the first time. I expect that one-third of you are regular readers, and that half of those are people I know. (Hi, Lanetta!)

That means 2/3 of you visited because you were attracted to the concept of graduation either through my Facebook (in which case you know me), Twitter, or search terms on Blogger, or because you were just bored. Or maybe you were an agent, but I only gave my blog address to one agent so far.

I have no way of knowing who you are, and as they say, curiosity killed the cat. Each of you has a story. Each of you has a reason to visit — whether it be “Because I’m graduating,” or “Because I was bored,” or “Because I’m a regular reader”, or “Because it sounded interesting,” or “Because I know you,”or “I have no idea”. Each individual reason has a story.

I wonder how many of you will be back to read this post. In a way, it doesn’t matter, because this IS the Internet, where we read anonymously and write anonymously, even if we’re writing nasty dreck on Facebook. For all the information-sharing, we don’t really know each other here.

But what if we started to?