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<p>You don’t think that she might find the things you want to talk about tedious? What’s the difference? You’re bored with what she wants to talk about; she’d be bored by what you want to talk about. So maybe your conversations are best served by being short and sweet, and losing the “sigh, what you have to say is so tedious” attitude?</p>
<p><a href=“I%20talk%20about%20American%20regional%20accents%20to%20American%20friends,%20naturally,%20and%20I%20always%20use%20metaphors%20/%20accessible%20examples%20when%20explaining%20a%20new%20concept,%20e.g.%20when%20examples%20like%20Singlish%20or%20Nicaraguan%20Sign%20Language%20are%20pertinent%20because%20they%20are%20an%20interesting%20case%20study%20of%20language%20development,%20etc.”>quote</a>
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<p>Maybe that’s part of it. I might have fun comparing / contrasting accents with friends from other parts of the country, but I don’t want to be feeling as though someone is lecturing to me or giving me a full-blown linguistics lesson. It’s ok to have casual talk about concepts without sounding as though one is writing a dissertation.</p>
<p>Dissertations are fun things to read – well-written ones are enjoyable. I always try to present the minimum possible to convey a particular idea. </p>
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<p>Haha, but my mother is persistent … I think she finds it hard to hang up. Even when I was on urgent homework assignments, she always wanted 5 minutes more. </p>
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<p>None.</p>
<p>I just don’t get why I keep being nagged to have long tete-a-tetes if we both know the fact.</p>
<p>Anyway.</p>
<p>OK, so that’s your mother. Tell me again why that translates to “adults being passionless and uncurious”? Seems she’s plenty curious – about where you live and how you’re doing.</p>
<p>Because it’s a general, observable trend … but maybe it could just be me and my friends, hey…</p>
<p>It never feels as though she’s being curious about how I’m doing, more like “I’m your mother, give me a status update or I’ll call the police”.</p>
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YDS, I L<3ve you. ;)</p>
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That you would make a thread here about it (and keep returning to the subject) says something. Why not find a nice cooking forum, where you might hook up with others who are passionate about the question of vanillin (with various spices) vs vanilla (with the same spices added as a control)? What we have in common here is that we (well, most of us) are parents of high school- to college-aged students. Not that we have passionate opinions on the use of isolated chemicals in baking.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t post on your culinary exploits here… but it seems pretty silly to infer from the responses here that adults are “passionless and uncurious” and our brains must be fossilized. Maybe we’re just not that into your topic of choice. If we find common ground, we can have interesting conversations. Same thing with your mom.</p>
<p>By the way, the intricacies of office politics can provide hours of fascination to a dispassionate observer. Sun Tzu and Macchiavelli had nothing on the middle manager with the corner office down the hall. ;)</p>
<p>Cooking forums are a bit intimidating, as they seem to be filled with folk with 50-spice spice racks and an arsenal of cooking equipment a poor college student wouldn’t be able to afford…</p>
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<p>Exactly. It begs the question as to whether you have the nuances to understand what conversational topics work in certain settings. The discussion of vanilla vs vanillin might be a great topic when you and your chem-class buddies are studying together or working in the lab together or even sharing a meal together. However, that same discussion doesn’t work too well at a frat party 
or as part of a status update when your mother calls long-distance. Different situations call for different topics. The very fact that you returned to the discussion of v vs v in the midst of a different topic suggests that you may not fully get those nuances. </p>
<p>Do all the people on your floor or apartment at UVA appear as engaged in these topics as you are? Why or why not? Does that make them intellectually incurious, or does that make them normal college-age students who might want to hang out and talk about movies and music and such?</p>
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<p>That may be, Galoisien, but that doesn’t make those of us who couldn’t see why you didn’t just try each option and move on “intellectually incurious and passionless.”</p>
<p>Um, I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I’m calling people out for being uncurious and passionless because they don’t like cooking topics … I figure a lot of parents care because they care for their own household (and whereas my more affluent peers prefer to eat out apparently). </p>
<p>But no, I’m talking about stuff in general, I don’t know why you want to concentrate about a single facet of my interests, and it’s not my interests either – but the interests of my generation in general. (I only defend my interests because I don’t think they’re that esoteric.) </p>
<p>Adults in general seem pretty uninterested to discuss anything beyond the daily metro, boulot, dodo. I suppose part of it has to do with managing a household – the whole issue that people become boring when they “settle down”. They also seem less enthused to discuss ideas. Unless it’s for work, of course.</p>
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<p>They’re pretty engageable actually … I live at the International Residential College, lots of cool, multilingual, multicultural people – even applying to those who grew up in Michigan. </p>
<p>Pretty innovative too – sometimes far more engaged or passionate about their stuff than me. Take say, the finer points of marijuana consumption, where they study the aerodynamic flow between the hallway, their rooms and the windows outside and how it may be altered with fans (miniature, for the window and heavy-duty), wet cloth, careful breaths, temperature distribution in the smoking device etc. in order to ensure the smell of weed is never detected by RAs in the hallway and that minimal blowback occurs. </p>
<p>Not that I myself indulge in the practice. But it’s pretty interesting. </p>
<p>It was with them where we talked about the organic synthesis of THC and the importance (or undesirability) of various accessory compounds, including possible routes to genetically remove the major components of the smell of weed (to prevent detection) without removing the desirable compounds. The problem, we concluded, was funding and lack of appropriate capital, but this wouldn’t necessarily be an insurmountable problem because there are other ways to raise capital…</p>
<p>And there are other plethoras of knowledge that college students indulge in to maximise their enjoyment of course, not necessarily involving chemistry. But a lot of adults wouldn’t seem to share the same innovativeness, even if it didn’t involve risque pursuits like pharmacologically-active substances.</p>
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<p>HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! No, you don’t. Your posts exhibit logorrhea. The bottom line is that you are fascinated with <em>yourself</em> and wonder why everyone else isn’t as fascinated with <em>you</em> as <em>you</em> are. (Frankly, I find a lot of your posts whiny and childish.)</p>
<p>Adults learned long ago what you are just figuring out. Many just aren’t interested in rehashing what to them is now well-established knowledge; they have moved on to other interests. Those ideas that you want to discuss? Many adults have already had those conversations. Just because something is new to you doesn’t mean it’s new to adults.</p>
<p>I talk about my passions with those who share them, not with random strangers on a board devoted to an entirely different topic. Maybe you should consider doing the same.</p>
<p>Forgive me for not reading the thread and if this has alresdy been said:</p>
<p>I am a counselor surrounded by engineers. Almost all of them live in the now and can’t for the life of them answer questions about how they are feeling etc. It’s just not in their make-up. Their brains just don’t work like that. So give mom a bit of a break and get that need in your life elsewhere. She is most likely not withholding or not interested in you. It may be just the way she is. I get my emotional support from my friends. Took me 40 yrs to learn this about my engineer family.</p>
<p>The title of this thread is: “Why do adults seem to be passionless and uncurious?”</p>
<p>The real title of this thread should be: “I wish my mother and I got along better, that I felt closer to her, and that I felt she was interested in me.”</p>
<p>VeryHappy,
You are right, and we all could help the OP by answering the question that you stated. Thank you for having such compassion and empathy.</p>
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<p>Just curious: How long is your phone conversation when you call your child? And how often do you call him/her? For us, we usually call our OOS child once a week, each time about 20 minutes – unless he is too busy (then our call can be as short as 30 seconds), or there is something urgent (then we call as needed) or sometimes he prefers to talk to us longer (e.g., when he is bored and likes to talk to someone.)</p>
<p>At one time, he called us when he could not get into sleep while staying overnight at a hotel due to a cancelled flight. Maybe he found that “being lectured at” is a very effective sleeping aid so he made a good use of his parents in this way, and we did not mind :-)</p>
<p>Granted, as parents, we LOVE to call him more often. But we purposely restrain us from doing that.</p>
<p>I notice that some parents call more often, some less often. An extreme case is that a parent calls her child every other day! Another extreme case is that she just drops an email once in a while as needed and rarely calls.</p>
<p>To OP, parents’ role is often different from your friend’s. As you grow older, you may notice that friends come and go, but your parents will always be with you – whether you like it (or appreciate it) is another issue that I do not want to discuss here.</p>
<p>"Pretty innovative too – sometimes far more engaged or passionate about their stuff than me. Take say, the finer points of marijuana consumption, where they study the aerodynamic flow between the hallway, their rooms and the windows outside and how it may be altered with fans (miniature, for the window and heavy-duty), wet cloth, careful breaths, temperature distribution in the smoking device etc. in order to ensure the smell of weed is never detected by RAs in the hallway and that minimal blowback occurs. "</p>
<p>Funny that you cite that as an example of their curiosity and passion. I imagine that your mother would be able to talk similarly on topics regarding aerodynamics, but, understandably, you’d prefer that she talk about something more personal.</p>
<p>I agree with those who have suggested that your mom talks about things the way that most engineers do. I wouldn’t be surprised if most parents who are engineers don’t demonstrate emotional connectedness to their kids in ways that some of their kids would like. You aren’t going to be able to change your mom. I agree with those who suggest that you’ll need to accept her as she is while going elsewhere to get the needs that she can’t fill for you.</p>
<p>Ironically, there are parents who are more into the kind of emotional connectedness and communication that you like, but who have kids who have engineer personalities. What you’d experience as a loving interest, these parents kids experience as being overwhelmed with questions they can’t answer, topics that they find boring, and parents who hover too close. The parent thinks she’s expressing an interest by asking, “What’s your college essay on,” “What are you thinking of majoring in?”, “What happened today in school”, but the kid feels intruded upon and smothered.</p>
<p>'Just curious: How long is your phone conversation when you call your child? And how often do you call him/her? For us, we usually call our OOS child once a week, each time about 20 minutes – unless he is too busy (then our call can be as short as 30 seconds), or there is something urgent (then we call as needed) or sometimes he agrees that he needs to talk to us in more details (e.g., when he is bored and likes to talk to someone. '</p>
<p>Younger S and I talked about three times on the phone last semester. I’d love to talk more, but he’s busy, and I can see that he’s working hard to establish more independence. He obviously has been taking a great deal of pride in picking courses, figuring out his daily challenges, etc. without relying advice for me, so although I’d love to talk more, I’ve been respecting his independence.</p>
<p>He did, though, create a blog just for H and me and some other adult friends. He updates it about twice a week and provides very interesting info on his life. Interesting, although H loves S dearly, H has more of the engineer personality, and forgets to look at the blog while I check daily looking for updates.</p>
<p>S also FB friended me, which was a nice thing to do, and has let me follow his life in a nice way. I loved when for Mother’s Day, he used a profile pix of him and me. :)</p>
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<p>galoisien, this is how you come across. You’re writing style is a bit tedious to read, and gives off the sense that you are always looking down on all the little people around you and assessing their worth. </p>
<p>As for your mom, perhaps she is trying to push you away a little in order to help you grow up a bit. Or maybe she’s just tired of trying to live up to your expectations.</p>
<p>Galoisien, dearheart, I mean this with all the love and proxy parenting in the world – have you ever been screened for Asperger’s Syndrome? I am not going to armchair-diagnose you, but you are ringing the Aspie bells, all right.</p>
<p>I’ll be honest – I find you fascinating. You sound quite brilliant. But also kind of a pain in the drain. Tell ya what, if someone cornered me with a recitation about vanilla vs. vanillin, MSG or any other food ingredient I would run screaming from the room. Cooking! Not my thing at all! </p>
<p>But then again, I have a history of boring people comatose with the intrigue surrounding the colore vs. disegno argument, the resonance of value/tint/hue, where the Baroque ends and the Rococo begins in Versailles, blah blah blah. So you know – chacun a son passion.</p>
<p>This was most worthy, geek_mom!
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<p>What you said!
Furthermore, people I love tell me that some of the most unhelpful behavior takes place in academic research labs. And in terms of professional cooking, I think a lot of chefs have some loose screws so you’re not immune there either.</p>