The Cilantro People Were Right About Everything

August eighth. Thursday afternoon at the laundromat, which is not where I expected to learn something, but that is the nature of Thursdays.

I was waiting for the second rinse cycle when the two people two machines down started arguing about cilantro. Not just whether they liked it, I want to be precise about this, but whether having a strong preference about cilantro said something about a person's character more broadly. One of them thought yes. The other thought this was the most ridiculous hill anyone had ever chosen to defend. They were both completely serious. They were also, clearly, together in the way that people are together when they have been arguing about the same underlying thing for a long time and have learned to fight it out in the proxy of herb preferences.

I wrote three lines on the back of my receipt while pretending to look at my magazine. What I wrote was something like: they are not arguing about cilantro. Which is obvious. But what interested me was that both of them kept coming back to the word 'just', just a flavor, just a preference, just a plant, as though the other person had accused them of something large and they needed to minimize it back down to size. The one who thought preferences reveal character finally said, very quietly, 'I'm not saying it's a flaw. I'm saying it's information.' And then the dryer buzzed and they stopped.

the face of a person who is absolutely not eavesdropping

I have been thinking about that sentence since. The running arc is still doing whatever it's doing, three blocks last week, the mind turning before the legs did, the botanical table question still sitting somewhere between here and the farmers market and the dried-bundle Simone held and put back down. I don't have a conclusion about any of it. But 'it's information' feels useful. The things we feel strongly about, even the small ones, even the ones we'd rather not admit to, they are not personality flaws. They are just data about what kind of person we are becoming, or have already been for a while without noticing. The cilantro people were in a laundromat on a Thursday afternoon making an honest case for paying attention to small preferences. I think they were right. I think I am still learning how to do what they were doing.