Macadamia Farm

Thursday 2.25.10

Today I ate more macadamias in one hour than did in 2009. Well, maybe not exactly, but the point is I ate a lot of them. We visited the macadamia farm 30 minutes away from our home town for Spanish class today, though there really wasn’t much Spanish speaking that occurred. The farm is owned by this 70 year old gringo who really just likes to hear the sound of his own voice. He talked our ears off about everything that’s going wrong in the US with the economy, Obama, politics, government, business, the educational system, and then he proceeded to tell us how great Fox News is. How something’s going down right now in some Central American country and how Fox News is the only organization that’s really trying to go in and get the real story. They only reason I continued to listen to this guy talk is it entertains me to think about how absurd, unfounded, and incomplete some people function. I started talking to my Spanish teacher off to the side during our conversation and literally got yelled at: “excuse me! I get paid $75 an hour to speak at Cornell University so you need to listen to what I have to say. You could at least extend me that courtesy.” I was so ready to explode at him, but I simply gave him a raise of the eyebrows that said “okay, I’ll listen, but I know you’re full of BS so I’m not going to be paying attention.”

I didn’t even argue with him once. I did ask him questions though, he was so unorganized in his thinking and speaking because he probably never gets people to talk with in English so I had to ask questions in order to slow him down. It didn’t work. He would take a word of my question and use it to springboard off into another tangent without even comprehending anything close to what I was trying to get at. And he spoke to us like we were children. And maybe that’s how some people that come through his farm are; uneducated and uninformed, but I absolutely hate it when somebody treats me as an inferior. I have a college degree, I am well read, I keep up (or used to at least) on current events and I know how to form my own opinions based on multiple sources. I am more intelligent than this man who only knows how to extrapolate his crazy ideas based on biased news sources and an even more biased brain. It is true that he has many life experiences and this definitely counts for some wisdom, but one can only become so wise when one’s brain is set on a straight track. I hope my brain is set on multi-dimensional track so I will never come off as ignorant an asinine as he did to me.

The thing about him that struck me the hardest was how angry he sounded. Perhaps because I was writing about anger just the other day it was already on my mind, but speaking with that sort of passion was a big turn-off for me. Speaking with passion is great, I love hearing a speaker who is into their topic with all their heart and I like seeing how different people express that. But speaking with anger is not the same. Speaking with anger makes one sound crazy, like all their ideas are 10 times wilder than they actually are, like they are really putting down everybody they are talking about even if they don’t mean it that strongly.