Feigning Interest

The holidays put me in the position of having to talk and interact with people I would normally not really talk and interact with.  When I was a kid all that I could think about on Christmas day was presents.  Now I wake up and think about how much I am going to have to feign interest in things I don’t care about.  Sometimes when I am mad about it, I tell myself that I will force everyone else to talk about what I am interested in, and if they are not interested in obscure Russian poetry or the intricacies of first year law, then tough shit.  I am always the one who has to go down to the intellectual level of other people.  Of course, most people’s opinions on these matters are restricted to the most obvious things, so that it would not help that much anyway.  Still, sometimes I want to be a tyrant about this.