Even though I say that I quote-unquote "hate everything" (or use similar terms to express the same basic meaning), this is a blatant lie, and anyone who knows me in any capacity will be aware of this. I feel towards some things a less-advanced state of hatred that barely resembles hatred at all. Dogs, for instance. Dogs produce a nice sort of feeling in me whenever I see them, because I enjoy them. It's not a huge sense of enjoyment. I don't go away from petting an unexpected stranger's dog thinking, "That was fulfilling. Since the universe has dogs in it, it can't be all that bad." I just don't work like that. But I still enjoy dogs, and thus when I say I "hate" everything, it's only a loose approximation of how I feel about the universe-at-large.
Therefore, it is very fascinating and a bit frightening whenever something makes me truly excited. I had one such experience today. Of the relatively short list of things I actively enjoy, food is on that list. Even I, hater of a lot of things, like food, and to be honest, I'd be extremely uncomfortable if I met someone who didn't feel the same.
One of the foods I like is pie. I have liked pie for a very long time and to a very high degree. I am not so inordinately fond of it to the point where I can't function for having thoughts overtaken by this high-calorie, crust-and-filling dessert, but I like it nonetheless. Pie is brilliant, but it tends not to excite me. The event in which I do something like yelling, "PIE! PIE IS GREAT! I HAVE BEEN EXPOSED TO PIE AND A SENSE OF HUGE, OVERWHELMING ENTHUSIASM HAS BEEN INSTILLED IN ME! YAAAAAAY!!!" would be highly unusual.
And yet something very much like this occurred recently. I am currently in the mountains with my friend and a lot of my family (meaning my sister, father, aunt and uncle, and their three small children). The aforementioned aunt indicated that she might have some sort of plan involving giving me pie (that is, she texted me the other day, asking what my favorite kind of pie was - I said it was a tie between chocolate and apple). She didn't, however, say that she was actually going to give me pie, nor when and where she would give it to me.
This made the event of finding not one but two Marie Calendars' pie boxes in the kitchen while making sandwiches for my friend and I a very unexpected event. I did that thing my sister claims I do when I get excited, back when I still got visibly excited (which involves widening my eyes, opening my mouth, turning my feet inward and waving my hands excitedly). I grabbed for the pie boxes to try to open them as hurriedly as possible without showing signs of tampering. Sure enough, they were chocolate and apple. My aunt had gotten the pies, and this delicious food made me excited.
I then found myself in the odd situation of having to explain to myself why I was so excited by the pie. Was there really something so magnificent about the presence of the dessert or the fact that someone had gotten it for me so as to induce such an over-the-top reaction? No. Not really. But some small, beautiful factors (surprise, thoughtfulness, deliciousness, etc.) had all intersected in this event, and the combination was enough to make me excited.
People get excited. It's a fact of humans. Even the most negative or non-excitable of us will (generally) have something that makes us outwardly show our approval of something. Maybe that's one of the great things about the human species, that we are capable of appreciating things so much that we can't help but express it. And there are all sorts of small aspects that situations can have and that have the potential to get people excited. Enough of these in the same place can excite people who normally don't get excited about things. Apparently, I am not so unhumanlike as to be immune to these facts.
What was the point of this? Humans. Humans was the point of this. Humans get excited, and they are capable of getting excited, and even if this isn't common to an individual's personality, it can still happen, and that's brilliant.
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