I DON'T KNOW MUCH

POSTED ON JULY 7, 2012 - ANDREW

I DON’T KNOW MUCH

POSTS

I DON’T KNOW MUCH
an Andrew ramble

People frequently tell me how smart I am. They comment on how well read I am and how my analytics and deductions are ever so insightful. I must admit that I do have my moments, and I do believe that I have a superior talent to cross reference small bits of information faster than most. As for the smarts, the knowledge base, and the deductive reasoning, I’m here to state that these just aren’t traits I possess. Additionally, my core-knowledge is virtually non-existent other than a surface knowledge that I skimmed off of my sub par performance as a public school student and the sham that could be called my bachelor’s degree. I do have the ability to put myself “out there” as an aspiring intellect, but as I will reveal in the following paragraphs; I DON’T KNOW MUCH.

Let me start with the medium I am currently working in, the written word. I am often told that I am a pretty good writer. Nothing could be farther from the truth. My writing consists of three actions. The first is saying what I would like to write in my head and then writing it down. The second is putting capitals at the beginning of sentences, names, places, etc. The other part is simply placing a comma where I would take a breath and a period at the end of a sentence.

Now on to the things that I am totally clueless about. I really don’t know how or when to use a semi colon. This is really bad considering its preeminent place on the home row of the QWERTY keyboard. As for this thing~ . What the hell is that? And what the hell are these things [ ]? Sometimes I see them placed around words that I think a writer intended to “clear” things up for my dumb ass, but I’m not sure.

Then there are the innumerable grammar rules, constructs, and classifications that I have no knowledge of. Here are some that come to mind in no specific order: (notice the proper use of the colon) prepositional phrases, past and dangling participles, predicate, adjectives, conjunctions, sentence diagraming, the ABA CCDA crap they ruin poetry with, pronouns and last but not least interjections. Maybe I should have paid more attention to School House Rock.

These things are just bumps in the road compared to my real nemesis…..spelling! I never know when to end a word with y or ies. As for apostrophes, do we really need those? Do they go before the s, at the end of a name, of after it? Do they make a word plural or do they show ownership of some kind? I can’t get it straight. I just roll the dice and hope a green squiggly line shows up under whatever I am typing. When it comes to the words that sound alike, I really gotta give some thought to knight and night and right and write. I before e? Why does that never seem to work out for me? (Poetry) My first grade teacher used a mnemonic that said one letter does the walking and one does the talking. I don’t know what letters she was even taking about. I just remember sitting at my little first grade desk daydreaming about one living being that looked like a letter I and one that looked like an E holding hands and going on a date. I think the E was the talker in that relationship. I wonder what ever happened to those two?

Now we come to the Big Daddy. MATH. To say that I have a blind spot for mathematics is like saying that Stephen Hawking has a little trouble tap dancing. Sure, I can handle the pluses, minuses, times tables, and gozintas, but after that I am in in a parabolic free fall that would most likely defy all known laws of physics. Maybe even mentioning physics is getting a little ahead of myself. Lets just start off with a little word problem trouble. You know the ones where a train leaves Chicago heading to New York moving at 85 miles an hour, and another train leaves New York heading to Chicago moving at 65 miles an hour? How long before they pass each other and what time will they arrive? Yeah, my answer to this one isn’t pretty. The Chicago bound train never arrives (all souls lost) and the New York bound train pulls into the station some time during the late Cretaceous Period.

Now we enter the dark realm of FRACTIONS. My trade requires me to carry a tape measure somewhere on my person almost constantly, so basic addition and subtraction of lets say 5 ¼ plus 3 5/8 are right up my alley. Pretty sure that one is 8 7/8. If not, do yourself a favor and never hire Golden Renovations LLC. Now when people start flipping them over and multiplying and dividing them, I just fall off the wagon. As can be assumed, with these “mad” basic skills backing me up, algebra was a real joy for me as well as being the true academic low point of my high school career. I can’t be alone in this. Fractions just suck. I’m pretty sure that the hatred of fractions is what drove Europeans to invent the metric system in the first place. Seems much easier and considering the fact that they can teach it to kids in Nairobi who share their meals of mush corn with the flies that live on their bloated stomachs, I am going to make the bold assumption that learning it is within my grasp.

Back to poor Professor Hawking. This is the place where I am seriously out gunned. This S.O.B. can only move one eye, that’s it! Yet with that one moving eyeball and a super developed mind, he solves how the entire universe works through math; he discovers black holes; (check me out I’m using a semi colon) finds new dimensions; writes a bunch of books and adds up shit that looks like this:

{A+Z -(FX~G)+ 3/4 Space Time> ^47% to the power of Mr. Spock (f) \@velocity of light. {cos})=world domination

You gotta be friggin kidding me!!!

Moving past the three R’s; reading, riting, and rithmatic, the world spreads out before me like a vast grey void of things I can’t seem to grasp. The Stock Market is as good a place as any to start. What is the Dow Jones Industrial and why do I care if it goes up or down? Does it have something to do with the number 10,000 because the radio news guys seem to be in ecstasy when it is above that number? Then there are the simple things like how does the interest rate on my mortgage work and how would a 1% rate reduction save me $300 per month. Good for me, but thank God I don’t have to work this one out. Compounded interest, Uh….huh. Funny thing is that I worked in the mortgage industry for 15 years. No wonder the economy crashed!

The other day I had a couple of guys here to fix my icemaker. The real problem was that it has a bad solenoid. Okay. As usual I nodded to them in false understanding and a knowing smile. I will just assume that it is an integral part of making things cold and leave it at that. At least with this type of guy stuff I can usually keep up. With most guy stuff, e.g., sports, I am really lost. What is an earned run average? Exactly what does a Corner Back do? Is a hat trick 3 goals in a row? I think it is. What is a power forward? (I think I hit the main sports on that one.) Obviously I’m not a “sports” dad, so by genetics (always the easy blame) I don’t have “sports” kids. Now that they are getting older at least I will finally have a few guys to hang out with and talk to at barbeques.

These things are just the very peak of the mountain of knowledge that I don’t possess. Despite my shortcomings with regard to my knowledge of so many subjects, I feel strangely comforted by the realization that I know less and less the older I get. Then I momentarily stop my lifelong panic. I stop trying to bluff my way through all the information that is beyond me because I know that more is “unknown” than is “known” in the world.