I Am Not Interesting

This one is dedicated to my dear friend Peter Van Valkenburg, who just became a father and remains one of the most interesting people I have the honor of knowing.

I wanted to be interesting. This was my ambition, but I was not especially ambitious in the pursuit of it. What I really wanted was to be naturally, effortlessly interesting. Or if effort had to be involved, or some price had to be paid, I wanted it to be squarely in the past. As a teenager I attempted to neatly arrange this by simply inventing a painfu…