<-- Home || Fiction | Editorial | Serial | Reviews | Bio Stuff | Personal | List-O-Rama
I’m Slowing Becoming Usurped By Wikipedia
When I was ten years old, I knew I was different from most of the people in
my
life. It was not my dreams and goals (Yet) and it was nothing as serious as
my sexual
preference or my physical being. I was like everyone else around me, except
I could
remember things they could not.
This helped out a lot in school. Before I grew bored and aimless I remembered
everything for tests simply by pulling the required pages to the forefront of
my mind
and reading them. Math was an issue because you had to memorize process, and
the
answers were not the same. Lincoln is always the sixteenth president and Japan
is
always in Asia but the quadratic equation is mastered by doing, not by memorization.
Does that make me a smart guy? Am I included because I have all of American
history
etched in my head on a timeline, or a I know the careers and resumes of Hollywood
actors, or I keep a decent vocabulary, or I can recall details of a person’s
life back to
them when they don’t remember telling me about them in the first place?
You make
your judgment.
So, I can remember. At first I was a novelty. My father called me on the phone
to
answer trivia question for him while he was out with his friends. (I don’t
think I ever
received a cut of the winnings.) I always had to remember where we parked, and
what
we ate the last time we went to our favorite e restaurant. (Matt had the popcorn
shrimp.
He always has the popcorn shrimp. Doesn’t anybody else know that?!) When
I grew
older I fell in with a crew that was like me. They weren’t surprised with
all the crap I
knew and it became a fun competition who could pull information out the quickest,
who
was the most obscure, and who could make the other feel stupid for once. (That’s
another thing: I love to feel stupid.) That was a comforting and happy time.
Into the world I went and I found that when you aren’t crowded into classes
by
teachers who’ve thoroughly analyzed your test scores, you end up working
and living
alongside people who are just as confused and unfortunately impressed with something
that this is very, very normal to me. I was a freak again. My favorite comments:
Do you
sit around and memorize stuff all day? How do you know that? Yeah, I don’t
know, I
have a life. Sorry, that was before my time.
So I languished in my poor ability to work with humans for years. I resigned
to the
fact I would never fit in, because at their very core, people hate being reminded
of what
they don’t know. I taught for a brief time, and the gifted kids in my
class referred to
their similar gifts as “learning disorders”. They were probably
right. In this country, no
one likes intelligence. They think you’re up to something.
But nowadays I’m happy, but threatened. The internet is in most homes
in our
country, and guys like me are no longer of any use. Information is at your fingertips
and
even the most inane details about the world can be found with only a few clicks
of
research. Now the novelty fades. ‘You’re supposed to ask me who
directed Jerry
Maguire.’ ‘Of course I know where the Cleveland Browns moved to.
Ask me first!’
I guess there is still the matter of physically remembering that data once you’re
away from the PC, and organizing the data into a viable thought. And, you have
to try to
come up with an original spin if you ever want to be taken seriously. Plus the
internet
can’t help you with your vocabulary, speaking or writing effectively.
So I’m not
completely useless and obsolete. Just yet.
<-- Home || Fiction | Editorial | Serial | Reviews | Bio Stuff | Personal | List-O-Rama