Thursday! 2-27: Hello, Fellow Aficionado!
Volume 2, Issue 27
This week I learned a couple of things about the word “aficionado”. First, I learned it is Spanish and comes from the word for “affection”. It was originally used to describe devotees of bullfighting. The second thing I learned is that the word is synonymous with another very cool word: amateur. You might be familiar with my affection for that word if you follow me on Facebook*.
Why might this matter to you?
Do you remember that time you got really excited about something you truly enjoy and you almost shared that excitement with someone else but you didn’t? Maybe you remember that time when you pulled back your enthusiasm for a movie franchise or musical group or writer or artist or athlete because you were dead-certain “they” would get bored, tune out, or think you utterly boring. Maybe you thought they’d consider you one of those comic book nerds or a metalhead or “artsy-fartsy”. Whatever the reason, you choked down your excitement and went on about your day, a little bit sadder because you felt a little more alone.
You are an aficionado and that feeling you swallowed was your affection.
Don’t beat yourself up, though, okay? I’ve done it more times than I can count. Sometimes, I did it often enough in a short enough time that it made me feel like I was the only weirdo I knew. I loved baseball and fantasy books and Dungeons and Dragons and classical music and jazz and horn bands and poetry. I collected trivia the way other kids collected baseball cards. I loved words and read the dictionary for fun. An Earth, Wind, and Fire song could rev me up for an hour. Thing is, whenever I’d corral someone and try to share my excitement with them in the hopes they could see it the way I saw it, more often than not, they’d…be less excited. Way less excited.
It still happens today — not as often as it did when I was younger and I’d shrink back into myself at the faintest sign of boredom or disapproval. Still, it happens. I imagine it happens to you, too.
That’s okay. What I want to tell you here and now is I don’t want you to stop sharing the things you find cool. Without our enthusiasts, the world gets stale and sour. It fills up with the mundane and the banal. It stagnates. You, my fellow aficionado, freshen up the world around you. You give it brightness and wonder. You get people curious about things they’ve never considered. You open yourself up to more good experiences (and more bad ones, too, but that’s part of life and you learn how to handle those better the more of them you face).
One side note here. You don’t need a whole community to be an aficionado. You can love something and share it with the world outside of a Facebook Group or a fan club or an Instagram hashtag. You don’t need a bunch of people to make your enthusiasms valid. A community can help you feel more comfortable, more like you “fit in”, but it can also make you feel like less worthy of your enthusiasm. A community can spawn hierarchies and cliques that push good people away. If membership in a community of fellow aficionados helps you, enjoy it thoroughly, but if it doesn’t, don’t feel you must**.
What I want you to take this this week’s Thursday! is this: share your enthusiasms because you really can make the world around you better with them. You know how to be a happy fan without being a jerk***. I don’t want you to keep your joy hidden in your heart all the time. That’s how people get bitter and depressed. It’s how our world gets mean and sour. Let’s not have more of those, okay. Let’s have more “hey, that’s cool” and “you know, I’ve never seen that in that way before”.
Oh! One last note. It’s possible another aficionado (and we are all aficionados, aren’t we?) will try to share their enthusiasm with you and you won’t have even an ounce of interest. Don’t shut them down. Let them share, please. You can tell them you don’t know anything about the thing they’re sharing in a way that doesn’t make them feel like a discarded styrofoam cup on the side of the road. You can let them know you don’t quite understand why the thing they’re sharing is cool but that you love how it lights them up. You’d want them to do the same for you, right?
Right!
It’s possible I’ve seemed a bit bossy this week. If so, I do apologize. This is a subject that has bugged me for a long time — not always obviously or in a big way, but it’s never quite left me. We have an awesome power, we human beings. We can make our fellow human beings feel ten feet tall and bulletproof and we can make them feel like a wad of chewed gum. We can uplift the people around us or we can crush them. These days, it seems like the crushing happens a lot more often than the up-lifting. I suppose that’d to be expected. Humans aren’t sweet and pure and we aren’t at all bent toward good. The world isn’t getting more virtuous but we can fill our own corners with as much light as we can generate.
Shine. And share. And shine some more.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!
I tweaked a couple of things this week. Down at the bottom, you’ll see a link to Patreon where you can, if you wish, become a regular monthly patron of Thursday! and all the other writing I do. I’ve set up three different tiers. You should find one that’s nice and comfy. Also, if I clicked the right button in the right way, you can leave comments right under this newsletter in a neat little comments section. I’m not sure what else I might do with that, but it’s there and it’s kind of cool. Y’all can talk with each other and with me. Be cool and have fun.
*You really don’t need to follow me on Facebook. That place is all crazypants and unbridled greed for power, run by people who do terrible things in terrible ways. If you’re not there, don’t go. Stick with me here. I’m crazy, but not in the way a social media censor is.
**The whole idea of aficionados and community is interesting, but way too big for me to tackle this week. I can come back to it later if you’d like. Just let me know!
***And if you don’t, just remember to share with others the way you’d want someone to share with you. Honor boundaries and don’t take up all their time.
What I Wrote Last Week
One Last Thing
If you like my art and want to support me, here’s how:
First, share Thursday! with all your most clever and discerning friends.
Second, buy my first book of poetry. It has werewolves and a giant atomic monster!
Third, become a Patron Subscriber! That means you like what I do so much you’re willing to give me some amount of money each month. I’ve not enabled subscriptions through Substack yet, mostly because I’m not sure I want that extra complication, but Patreon stands ready to accept your monthly goodness!