being passionate

There are a couple things about which I am passionate. I don't just like these things, I love them:

• Learning. There are a few subjects I don't have much interest in learning about, but there are far more that I do. They are various and sundry. Many have a lot to do with science.
• Eating with family or friends. I'm not talking about coffee and danishes, although that's pretty good, too. I mean a FEAST, like at Thanksgiving. Where you sit down with lots of warm, good-smelling, filling food, and you stay sitting for a long, long time. It's not the food that's so much of the draw here, it's the being with the people.
• Animals. They are intriguing to me. I enjoy seeing them behave and learn and grow.
• Manual labor for other people. Digging holes, weeding, building, moving heavy objects, sometimes even cleaning - it doesn't matter, as long as it's not for myself. I could do activities such as these for hours and hours on end and not get sick of it. And I'd do them with stellar quality.
• Teenagers, especially high school ones. Like animals (although there are very significant differences), they intrigue me.
• Truth. I very much dislike half-truths, deception, confusion, and lies.
• Accuracy. Related to truth, I suppose, but different. Take for example, the incredible surge of emotion that I experienced when I overheard a woman relating to her friends a news story I had taken an interest in about a month ago regarding a large snake attempting to eat an alligator in the Florida Everglades. According to the woman, a boa constrictor tried to eat an alligator, but the alligator ate a hole through the boa's stomach and both of them died. I was quite perturbed that the snake's genus and area of origin had been significantly changed: in actuality, it was a Burmese python (which are from...Burma, or South East Asia, at least - boas are from Central America, or other boa-types are from Madagascar). In addition, as was pointed out by a friend who asked why both animals died if the alligator was able to chew its way out, it was the alligator's tail that was sticking out of the python, not the tooth-infested mouth. I had half a mind to go and correct this inaccurate reporting, but the other half of my mind told me this was a very ridiculous step to take, so I didn't.

Why these things? What is it that makes a person passionate about a certain thing but not others? I am NOT passionate about cooking or reading or even knitting, although I enjoy all these things. I am also not passionate about babies or children or virtues like patience and diligence. I sense that passions are very much inherent, that people are programmed by God to have certain strong likes and dislikes and soapboxes and indifferences. I don't have any evidence for this hypothesis, but it's what I'm working off of for right now. Perhaps one day I'll give this more thought...or I'll apply my passion for learning to understanding this exact subject; obviously, it's not one of those specific topics I'm passionate about learning about.