Smartness, and Other Trivial Pursuits

Being unemployed clearly comes with a list of downsides.  Hovering at or near the top of that list is what materialists might call a lack of "cash flow".  I actually disagree with that.  There is plenty of money flowing through my life.  It is flowing in a unilateral direction away from my checking account.

But, hell, I'm an unbridled optimist.  I like to believe that all things happen for a reason, and that the closure of one door portends the opening of another.  So I've decided to brave my perfect storm of joblessness and impossible debt by utilizing my time in the wisest possible manner, to navigate the rudder of my ship of life in a new direction.  I have decided to renew a lifelong quest that long ago fell dormant under a pile of casebooks.

I will accumulate more useless knowledge than any other person on the planet.

This expedition was inspired by a book I picked up earlier this week at Borders, which sits amidst the six-figure retail icons mentioned in my last entry.  It's called The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World.  The author, A.J. Jacobs, is a writer for Esquire magazine and later went on to publish the best-selling The Year of Living Biblically, in which he spends an entire year attempting to follow the Bible as literally as possible.  I'll read that volume later, as it is essential to my own quest.  In The Know-It-All, Jacobs sets out to accomplish the nerd's equivalent of scaling Mount Everest a hammer, nail, and dental floss: he intends to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica from cover-to-cover.  Every word of every entry on every page of every gold-embossed leather volume, from a-ak to Zywiec.  It is the sort of epic adventure that can transform your everyday polite house nerd into a remarkably maladjusted pile of Social Anxiety Disorder.  And I'm jealous.

I'm jealous because I once believed, as did Jacobs, that I was the smartest human being alive.  I had proof, too.  Count the trophies.  Third-place in the Washoe County Spelling Bee in sixth-grade, runner-up in the Sierra Pacific MathCounts competition in eighth.  Never mind the fact both of these trophies indicated that there were at least three people in my age group in Northern Nevada who apparently knew more than I did.  Narcissus never saw anyone else hogging his reflection, and neither did I.

Like an academic Linus, I clung to my intellectual superiority as a security blanket.  It was my perverse and ill-advised way of clawing my way up the public school pecking order.  I didn't have much else.  Sure, there was my stint as the class clown in fifth-grade (Ms. Davis, for the fortieth time, I am sooooo sorry for running around the classroom with scissors).  Other than that, I was a slightly above-average athlete with below-average social skills.  Knowing shit was my investment in a brighter future, one in which I would arrive at my high school reunion in 2010 driving a BMW with a supermodel wife.  I am clearly behind schedule on this plan.

Admittedly, the whole "I know a whole lot of useless crap" motif didn't work well for me socially in Reno.  I don't think I scored any points with the Bully's waitress after a softball game in which I, under the moderate influence of Killian's, recited who won and lost every World Series from 1903 to the present.  But in D.C., this sort of aversion to social connection paradoxically works.  Washington is easily the most educated city in the United States; some might say that it is over-educated.  It is not difficult for me to imagine a scene at Sidwell Friends High School where the chess champion shoves the quarterback into a locker.  And in this up-is-down, black-is-white, right-is-left, nerds-are-in and jocks-are-out town, it's time for me to utilize my strengths to climb the antisocial ladder, a ladder climbed only through the accumulation of useless trivia (see any Irish pub in D.C. on a Wednesday or Thursday night).

It irks me to no end that this pyramid of geek-hood is dominated by those, like A.J. Jacobs, with an "Ivy League education."  Oh yeah?  Well watch out.  Because I have a degree from the Western Athletic Conference.