Can I say this out loud? I don't generally find people very interesting.

I taught a girl at my last school that struggled with marijuana use. I knew this because she would write about it. When people are allowed to write things and submit them to you, they often trust you far more than you would think. She wrote in one of her responses to something or other that she didn't find people very interesting, and I thought, thank goodness.

I find a few people very interesting. People I would like to get to the level where we can hang out not looking at each other on a zipped-open sleeping bag in a back yard between glasses of white wine. (That's a lot of prepositions.) However, the likelihood of such events occurring are slim and non-existent, so I leave these moments to my imagination, whereby I create dialogue in my head or wake up from charming dreams of rich conversation and long periods of silence.

Today, I attended a PD (Professional Development) session with the acronym RAMP. I forget what it stands for: bridging Aboriginal ways of knowing, something something. It was quite good. I'm very attracted to Aboriginal spirituality. While fellow Christians might hiss at me for such a statement, I find comfort in thinking of the fellow beings around me having spirits to thank and honour. I like circles and inter-connectedness. We were all sitting in a circle, and we were out of time, so it was rushed. The speaker said to say who you are and whose you are, and he would beat a drum in between every person. I was nervous and unprepared, and everyone else was just saying two descriptors about what they're like, so I followed suit, and said "created, questioning," and then the drum went and it was someone else's turn, and I felt silly, because I wanted to say critical, not questioning, but I think it works, too. The speaker at that presentation is someone who I find to be interesting. And today I got to ask him how it came to be that he was presenting with only one contact in (he had mentioned it). He's a person I could learn from, and stare at, not necessarily romantically. You know what I mean.

Do you know what my great grandpa said to me? We were at a hall, and by a hall I mean a space that couldn't be more than 800 square feet, called North Bend. A wood stove heated the place, which with that, and the tiny kitchen oven running with farmer's wives' scalloped potatoes or lasagna warming, was always ridiculously hot. I'm the youngest in my family, and so was he. I was trying to make some kind of joke, being 10 years old or so, and said something like, "It's good to be the youngest because we'll live the longest." He said to me, "It's a curse; being the youngest enables you to see everyone you love die."

Yeah. Aaaand the childhood dreams of my dad and sister being trapped in a burning closet dim in comparison. My great grandfather is someone who I think was interesting.

Things are too rushed. I miss lounging in the growing shadow from the peak of my childhood home.