Cate Blanchett and the Thing That Makes People Interesting

Once you think about, it's so obvious.

For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here.

---

Not long ago, I saw this TikTok video of the actress Cate Blanchett repeatedly going off in various interviews on her long-standing hatred for leaf-blowers.

Yes, leaf-blowers.

@katewheeelershe is so invested I love her #cateblanchett #leafblowers

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

In the various interviews, she says:

• “You blow leaves from one side of the pavement to the other only for them to be blown back again? I hate [leaf-blowers] so much!”

• “What happened to the broom?”

• “It’s all that’s wrong with the human race.”

This is clearly not an act: Cate Blanchett truly hates leaf-blowers. And she has a good point! But that’s not why I’m so enamored with this clip.

It’s partly that she’s going on about this random, obscure topic that I’ve never given much thought to. But it’s mostly that she feels so passionate about it.

It reminds me of the random, obscure passions of my friends.

One couple I know is so obsessed with Turner Classic Movies that they’ve taken to regularly attending festivals and book events to meet fellow fans and old stars.

My friends, James and Marcy, right, with West Side Story’s Russ Tamblyn.

Meanwhile, another friend is fascinated by construction cranes, which she loves.

My friend Marianne, in front of one of her beloved construction cranes.

But darker passions, like Cate Blanchett’s hatred of leaf-blowers, are interesting too. One friend has a deathly fear of escalators and moving walkways in airports, going far out of her way to avoid them. And one hates dirt so much that she can’t even watch TV shows or movies where the characters are dirty.

Then there’s Michael who’s obsessed with, well, almost everything.

And then we come to my own random, obscure passions.

For example, water features.

When I was a very small boy, three or four years old, I was completely captivated by the little pond in my grandmother’s backyard. Every time we visited her, I couldn’t wait to go out back and explore that pond.

I’ve been obsessed with water features ever since.

My grandma’s pond today, now dried up. This is where it all began!

In fact, a few years later, at age seven or eight, I collected a bucket full of dozens of tiny frogs — what we neighborhood kids used to call “fingernail frogs,” because they were so small — from the swamp below our house, intending to keep them in a bucket in our garage.

The next morning, the frogs were all dead, and I felt absolutely terrible. These days, there are no frogs left in that swamp, fingernail or otherwise — mostly due to climate change, probably, but I’ve still always felt personally responsible.

I’ve felt so bad that I’ve never told another soul that I gathered and killed all those frogs, not until just now.

Even so, by age ten, I owned multiple aquariums, and I once caught a sunfish in the little lake beyond that swamp to keep in one of my aquariums.

Under the light of my aquarium, the fish was a stunning shimmering blue. But as beautiful as it was, it also looked so sad to me, all alone, away from its lake. I remembered all those fingernail frogs I had killed, and I felt so guilty that I scooped the fish up in a baggie and pedaled it back to the little lake to set it free again.

I’ve never told anyone that story either, even though I think it makes me look a lot better than the frog one. As a kid, I thought being sad about a lonely fish made me look like a soft-hearted sissy, and back then, more than anything in the world, I didn’t want anyone thinking I might be gay.

But looking back as an adult, I love that soft-hearted little boy. Maybe those fingernail frogs didn’t die in vain after all.