Thing Five of Five: Change

22 Nov 2009 7:15 AM

I have a large money box in my room, which is very heavy. It's an enormous can with a hole in the top. You have to use a can opener to open it.

Which I will, when it is full.

It is much more difficult to lift, than it is to lift Simon, my cat Simon weighs over 5kg. I estimate that the money box is around 10kg.

Actually, I am going to weigh it!

My money box weighs 9.6kg.

There's a lot of change in there, it's probably at least 10 years worth of change in there.

It's not the first money box I've had. I used to have a smaller can of money. When it got full I opened it.

And then I had a lot of change and nowhere to put it. So I got a bigger can.

A few months ago I was talking to a British friend of mine online. He mentioned that I was his only Australian friend and therefore it was a shame that he couldn't mock me about the cricket.

I told him that I had, since our last discussion about sport, grown to appreciate cricket quite a lot. I told him I had also grown to appreciate other sport, including AFL.

He told me that he was extremely impressed.

Not because sport is important to him and he thinks it should be important to everyone. But because... and I don't want to sound extraordinarily vain or anything but...

Hating sport was something that that I did, and took some amusement from. Other people would discuss results of some game or other and I would roll my eyes. I would enjoy discussing how much we didn't like sport with other people who also didn't like sport.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with that!

But, my friends, here is a challenge for you!

Pick something that you don't like, but that other people *do* like. Not something that you dislike because it really is a bad thing - ideally you will at least respect other people's affection for this thing.

Now! Your task is to discover if you dislike this thing because you enjoy disliking it (which is fine) or if you actually do dislike it (which is also fine). I find that it's fun to practice liking something for a while, to see how it turns out, but you may want to try that in secret so that you don't have to put up with people saying 'OH BUT I THOUGHT YOU HATED X!' which can be quite annoying.

If you try this experiment, I would like to hear about it! Or if you've tried it in the past, you can tell me about that too!

You can comment here and tell me why you hate(d) something, and whether you still do or not (I really enjoy growing not to hate things, I am not asking everyone to do the same).

I hated AFL because when I arrived in melbourne, all the kids at school had to know my football team (and also what my father did for a living, and what car(s) my parents drove) in order to decide who I could be friends with. I rebelled, vowed never to watch a game of football and spent the rest of primary school without any friends.

I eventually decided that watching football did not actually grant those past primary-school children any power over me. I decided that a lot of people being rather stupid and obsessed with this game didn't make it necessarily worthless. So I watched some. And it was quite enjoyable!