You learn, after a while; you get a read on people. You get to know without testing it just who will listen and understand when you romanticize things like the stars or when you go off on all sorts of fanciful flights about life elsewhere in the universe, about gravity wells, about lonely science fiction, about the differences between novae and supernovae. You get to know who feels the same way, or who is capable of romanticizing something, if not the stars, and who will appreciate your own inability to keep your damn mouth shut when your soul is stirred up like this. You get to know who couldn’t give less of a shit about it, and you don’t talk to them about anything real; your conversations with them are usually restricted to how drunk X got at Y’s party, and isn’t that the way it always is, and et cetera. Pretty soon everyone you know is categorized in this way, and the listeners are far outweighed by the motormouths, and part of you, just a small part, is a little bit disappointed in humankind, and another part of you snorts and accuses yourself of elitism, and so you stop thinking about it and move on.

-- deeply shallow