The most boring guy I’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering, I met in college. Let’s call him Daniel, even though that’s not his real name. Daniel was the son of a local politician, but you would not have been able to tell in a million years. Nine times out of ten, he wore all blue clothing: dark-blue jeans, light-blue shirt, medium-blue pull-over sweater and a dark blue jacket. Almost like the character in a comic book, he looked the same every day. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d say it almost reminded me somewhat of friends from high school whose parents weren’t well off financially speaking. Which intuitively was my first thought, until I learned more about his backstory. Perhaps you’d expect him to compensate his lack of fashion sense through building up his physique. While he was slightly taller than me, he was starting to grow a bit of a belly. Together with his narrow shoulders, it gave him a pear-shaped silhouette.
Since beards were making a comeback in the early 2010s, he made an attempt at growing one, which never suited him particularly well – it mostly seemed itchy from the looks of it. The only thing of note was his bright blue eyes, which, from time to time, showed some sparkle of life to him. Oh, and he played some music instruments pretty well. In conversations, he’d always take great care to be cautious about what he said, careful not to offend anyone, which doesn’t sound like a bad character trait, until you realise that it also meant that he couldn’t handle young twenty-year-olds kidding around with each other very well. You couldn’t exactly throw the sort of all-out sarcastic jabs at him (or even around him), like you could with other guys his age.
Both in our early twenties, testosterone and life force coursing through our veins, one day we were both walking next to each other, on a school excursion, heading to some museum. I asked him why the hell he picked the line of work he’d head into. I half-expected some answer about being absurdly passionate about his one field of interest (a wide variety of knowledge of history, his one main strength in life), but no. ‘Job security,’ he said. It striked me like the kind of answer someone’s parents would want their kid to say, not the innermost motivation of a young buck in his prime. But the sad part is, I believed him. Despite the fact that job security would likely never matter much in this young man’s life, this was likely about the extent his dreams would ever take him. Back then, his answer depressed the hell out of me. And, years later, when I was doing one substitute assignment after the other, I thought to myself, ‘Job security, huh? What a load of crap.’
From time to time, I’ve met people like Daniel in my line of work. They’re not bad people, but they’re not my kind of people. They’re the kind of people that would fit right at home with the sepia tones seen in the start of the Wizard of Oz. Personally, I’m on the lookout for anything that gives me that technicolor experience. I’m looking for the kind of films that make me want to revisit them a hundred times. I’m waiting for the kind of books that make me want to talk about them endlessly. I’m on the hunt for the kind of actors that somehow draw (and keep) your attention, like a piece of iron getting pulled towards a magnet. The same goes for people, anything. Boring just doesn’t cut it.
Kind regards
Vincent J. Dancet