What are you curious about?
I’m curious about a lot of things. We all are. That’s why Google is a thing. And in case you’re curious (see what I did there?), the last thing I googled was “Sydney Sweeney jeans ad” because, what is that about? Why is it so controversial? Pretty interesting rabbit hole by the way.
This question today though, made me flashback to the time when I wrote poetry, i.e. high school. That was before I realized that I’m not good at poetry and switched to entirely narrative. But there was a poem I had really wanted to write that came out so so badly. Like, really bad. I had thought about it for some time and had a really good idea for how I wanted it to go but man it went off the rails and did not turn out like I envisioned. And thinking about what my classmates said about it is actually pretty funny.
I mention it now because the premise of the poem is that it’s a girl questioning the world. Her voice starts out as a young child innocently asking her mom questions. Things like, why does the bird put his nest up so high? Questions that a child would be curious about. And then as the poem goes on, her questions evolve into more serious ones and reflect that she is going through some dark stuff.
It was going to be so good! But then when I actually finished it and shared it in my creative writing class, I distinctly remember someone said it sounded like the girl at the end is in a straight jacket rocking back and forth in a padded room. Yeah, it did kind of have that vibe to it at the end. Initially a good idea of childhood curiosity turned into an adult questioning her world. The execution just didn’t work right. And thus dashed my hopes of ever being North Carolina’s poet laureate. Though, to be fair, that year I was the co-editor of my school’s literary magazine and so I did put another poem of mine in there. It was about a girl sitting in a window experiencing the world. I think she may have been blind? I don’t remember. It was also one that wasn’t very happy. In fact, I think she died at the end. I do still have a copy of that magazine so I’ll have to break it out and re-read it.
All of that is to say, curiosity is just human nature. Trace it all the way back to cavemen inventing the wheel because I’m sure they were curious about how to make tasks easier. Certainly the motives behind the things we’re curious about are all different. The Google search I mentioned was because I kept seeing references to the jeans ad controversy so I wanted to see what it was all about. Someone else might be curious about it because they’re a fan of Sydney Sweeney. Our world is full of so many different things that there’s probably infinite possibilities of things to be curious about and infinite reasons to be curious about them. Plus, we’re humans with brains. We just want to know stuff! And for that we have the internet now. Thank you, Al Gore! (I’m kidding! I know he didn’t really invent the internet).
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