The perils of knowledge (part 1)

OMG I just bought the most disgusting slice of carrot cake in all creation. It is… chunky. And I don’t mean chunky in a nice way like oh maybe extra crushed pecans in the mix, no… I had a hard time putting my finger on it at first but, get this… there’s cinnamon in the mix. And now you’re rolling your eyes or possibly entertaining the notion that there might be more to it because carrot cake is supposed to have cinnamon (if you are, thank you ;)). Of course that’s not all… it’s not ground cinnamon, some supercilious assmunch apparently thought it would be a cool idea to put WHOLE CINNAMON  in the carrot cake. I am effectively getting a pretty good helping of sawdust in every damn bite. This is downright evil. It’s time to hit the reset button, Lord…

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about today…

There’s always a slight peril to being a well-informed, well-educated, curious individual. For one, people often distrust you because very few people want to submit to the possibility that someone may know more about any given subject than they do. I think this has a direct correlation to our obsession with social networking. Facebook is pretty much just a giant wankfest, a worldwide pissing contest.  Your worth is determined by the number of cool activities you participate in, your intellectual value measured by the quality of posts you share, and your social value by how much you’re tagged in other peoples’ memories. I’m slowly starting to get turned off by FB, to be quite honest. It’s everyone attempting to claw their way to the top of their network of acquaintances by showing how gosh darned more awesome their lives are compared to your bland, meaningless existence.

But yeah, people like to think they know best. I seem to notice a trend of people being less and less inclined to be amazed or sincerely captivated by new information others provide. I mean, of course it still happens within your closest circles, or so I want to imagine, but every time you try to share some new insight, reflection or an alternate take on something of common interest with another person of medium to distant closeness they seem to be ready to pounce and question everything you tell them. And I like questioning stuff, it’s the basis of curiosity, but people are losing their ability to say “really?!”

It’s sad. I don’t consider myself to be on a high tier of human knowledge. I often have to remind myself that I have read, seen and studied more than the average person, because it’s easy to lose sight of it in a landscape of self-aggrandizing characters. And yes, we’re all characters, because Shakespeare said so. Deal with it. So I’m not high tier but that’s ONLY because I’m high tier. Because true wealth of knowledge can only be measured by a person’s humility about what he knows. Knowledge is a freakin’ conundrum, the MORE you know, the MORE you know there’s a whole vast OCEAN of OCEANS of knowledge you cannot even hope to amass in its entirety during your lifetime. The more books you read the more you hear of others books you HAVE to read and there’s only so many hours in a day, so many days in a lifetime. It’s humbling, it’s THE most humbling thing in the world, so attempting to pose as a master of all things knowledge is actually the first sign that you’re dealing with a fake.

Maybe it’s my current surroundings, I don’t know, maybe you’re reading this shaking your head and thinking “well, who are you hanging out with, gurl?” and that’s sad because I’m a TEACHER, I’m supposed to be hanging out with the most like-minded of my ilk, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way at all. I mean, my theory about teaching is this: when you’re a carpenter with an apprentice, you’re teaching him to be YOU, or as close to you as possible or maybe even better. If you’re a tailor, same thing, you train someone to be LIKE you, to do the job you do as well as you do it. But when you’re a teacher you’re not training TEACHERS… nonono… you’re training LEARNERS. And people ain’t gonna learn jack SHIT if you don’t inspire them. As teachers we inspire others to learn, to seek out knowledge, to hunger for it. But how can anyone do that properly if they have NO passion for learning? I believe geeks make the best teachers. We made fun of how excited our grade school teachers were about class, but that’s because when you speak about what you love you want other people to feel that too.

Damn, that went on… and I’m not even halfway through with this subject. Oh well, to be continued.