The Nice and the Interesting

You can be described as nice. You can be described as interesting. You cannot be described as both at the same time, by the same person. For 'nice' is a bland word, and 'interesting' usually means there's some quirkiness, not flaws in character, just some strangeness that those who consider themselves normal profess they do not own, for they are proud to say they are salt of the earth, run of the mill types with no oddities about them. Though it could be of course they don't see their oddness and only reason that they attract it to them. Such people are drawn to them like moths to light-bulbs: they see in them their inner flame, that's what they tell themselves in this modern age, and so stoke their ego fire that they positively glow.
But this was not meant to be about them: the ego-stirred, but about the nice and the interesting. I may, I believe, in the opening paragraph, have given you the impression that this can't be one and the same person. If so, that was false. For it can be two aspects of the same person, which, say, one acquaintance knows and another doesn't. My point being really (if you can call it a point or even a matter of interest) is that one will know you only as nice and another as interesting. You cannot, in my experience, be known to one as both bland and to have 'something' which some might call 'edge'. I would suggest that those who would describe you as 'nice' don't know you at all, whereas those who say you are interesting know something more. They have found, or been allowed to find, a deeper layer. A different voice to one in which you usually conduct your everyday affairs.
It could be that the 'interesting' is not a trait, but an interest, an unusual one, that so rarely heard of it makes of it a topic, or one that seems not to fit. It could also not be anything as solid as an interest, but opinions to this or that, because these, too, might surprise; cause a lip to curl, an eyebrow to rise. A person who was 'nice' can in this way be elevated to 'interesting'. As can the 'interesting' choose only to be seen as 'nice' by not divulging anything – about their life, about their interests, about their opinions. But make no mistake one cannot be known as both to one and the same person at the same time.
When the 'nice' prove they are interesting to people who previously only thought they were nice there's always a start, a little shock, which could be good or it could be bad. Because you see those described as only 'nice' are either never thought much about or wondered about a lot. Indifference versus mystery, where one will win out.
The problem with indifference is that it labels the 'nice' as vapid and vacuous. The problem with mystery is that it puts false notions into people's heads: it's a test to ace, a code to crack, a maze to find the way into and out of. The problem with both is that assumptions are forever being made. Which of course means there will always come a moment of disappointment. And often that disappointment cannot be overcome for either party. One realises they haven't (as they thought) been accepted and have, in fact, failed to live up to something they didn't know they had to live up to, and the other has had their ideas crushed, which is nobody's fault but their own for entertaining them in the first place.
Complicated, eh? Yes, I suppose it is, at least for those unused to contemplating and dealing in real terms with the nice and the interesting. How the terms are implied is another matter entirely as I hope I've demonstrated.
The 'nice' give people nothing to think about, whereas the 'interesting' give them something, but they'd be hard pressed to say what exactly. They never think that the problem might lie within themselves, in that they cannot be bothered to find out, for instance, what is so nice, or what so interesting, or even if their impression of nice or interesting was too hasty; or if they had perhaps, in that haste, confused one for the other.
Instead, because really, their time is too precious to spare it a thought, they describe a person whom they know a little or a lot as 'an incomprehensible creature'. Which is basically a shorthand way of admitting they're incapable of comprehending or unwilling to comprehend. They do not realise that in blaming the creature for their incomprehensibleness, they have not declared themselves superior, but have made themselves appear superficial.

Picture credit: Labyrinth, David Burliuk (source: WikiArt).

Written April 2020.