Soooo…It sez on your profile that you’re passionate.
Ordinarily, Janice wouldn’t be so forward, but it was only two minutes into the meet-up and already they’d fallen into an awkward silence and Janice was desperate to move things along so she didn’t drift into her usual daydream about an alien spaceship that beams her aboard and whisks her away to the planet of men who are actually interesting.
Yeah, passionate.
That was it. Nothing more. No elaboration. No self-aggrandizement. At this point, Janice would’ve been happy for some straight-up bullshit. But nothing. Christ, she couldn’t even remember his name. She was afraid he’d coalesce into a generic cardboard cutout. She’d toss him onto the heap of generic cardboard cutouts she was collecting in her bedroom.
The boy pulled off his beret and began to fondle it nervously on his lap. Janice noted that—Oswald! That was it! The improbably named Oswald. With his goatee and receding hairline and his cup of dark roast diluted with half a cup of milk and five packets of raw sugar.
What’re you passionate about, Oswald?
About?
Yeah, what about?
Was that a shrug? It was hard to tell. He’d raised his shoulders, but that could’ve been him shifting in his seat.
Maybe I’m wrong, Janice said, but I don’t think of passion as something that happens in the air. It’s attached to other things. Passion for justice. Passion for poetry. Passion for synaesthesia. See what I’m saying?
I suppose what I meant is that whatever I commit to I commit to with passion. No half measures. I dive in. All of me. That sort of thing.
So, Oswald, what’re you committed to? Right now?
Again with the shoulders. He may have been shifting in his seat, but this second time around was pushing the needle more to the shrug end of the scale.
I guess I’m passionate about being passionate.
Oh, come on.
Why not?
It’s…it’s… (Janice knew there was a word to describe what Oswald was doing, and not a complimentary word either, but the word eluded her in the moment.)
This is the world we live in, you know. Where people are expected to be passionate about things. What’s wrong with being passionate just for the sake of being passionate?
But listen to you. We could have a good argument about this, but you don’t even raise your voice.
As an answer to her spaceship daydream, Janice had a passionate argument daydream where she and her coffee date get into a blistering disagreement, practically strangling each other across the table, and the whole thing leads inevitably to the kind of sex that sets the world on fire.
Oswald shrugged. This time it was definitely a shrug. An indisputable shrug. She could get others in the coffee shop to swear affidavits attesting to the shruggishness of the shrug.
I don’t know, Oswald said. It just seems like the sort of thing you’re supposed to put on your profile. Most of the time, I couldn’t give a shit about what’s going on.
So. What? You’re passionate about slacking off?
I guess. Doesn’t really matter to me.
