unlearning

First of all: thank you to jnf for the goodies. Second of all: thanks to Herr Cook for the phone call. Third: the following post. If one can jump to such conclusions, I think one of the main spiritual lessons I had to endure this year is, deceptively, one of the simplest. Here it is in general form--I am not as _______ (insert superlative that you secretly think about yourself here) as I think I am. When it comes down to it, I should have tattooed somewhere on my body the immortal line of Jules' (Samuel L. Jackson's character in Pulp Fiction): That's just Pride fuckin' witcha. Let me explain. I'm not claiming that this phrase should go up there embroidered on any grandmother's wall, but it came in extremely handy this year. Why? Let's just be transparent for all the world to scorn, shall we...? Up until September 2004, I thought I had read more books than most people. And I thought that meant something. I won't go so far as to say I thought I was smarter than most people. "Smart" is a really unhelpful term, especially given that you have to be smart about something. You have to know a great deal about a certain subject, whether it's selling drugs and being able to determine a real buyer from a Narc or building superconducting supercolliders. Smart is something that everyone is about some topic in their lives. So I don't think that I'm smarter than you in some general sense. But I once thought that my library was sorta impressive and so that meant that I could call to mind what some authority on a subject said about some such thing. It's a useful talent, but I'm not sure that it conveys the sense of self-impressedness that I got out of it. A character in a book I just read (ignore the internal irony here) nailed it on the head when he said that bookshelves are just trophy cases for those no good at athletics. And I admit, I succumb to such things--if you have a few thousand books in your posession and you aren't a library (or you're your own library), I am impressed. I think you're probably "smart", whatever the hell that means. So part of my unlearning process--or my disassembling process, if you want to use current popular terminology--was going through 2500 years of science, 100 years of American history, and a whole crapload of other stuff and realizing that (1) it was all new information for me, though many of my fellow students had heard it ad nauseum before, (b) it was all Greek to me--the fact that some of it was Greek did not help, and (3) a large number of people read more quality books in a year than I have my entire life. These people are called "nerds." Unless they're in academea, in which case they're called "professors" or "good graduate students." These professors, and many, if not most of the students in my program at ND, are both more well-read and (by any measurement of academic preparedness) are smarter than me. This is good for me. It sucks that I feel so far behind. It sucks that I spent most of my life doing things like playing Madden NFL, Axis & Allies, Battletech, and Candyland while these people were reading Aristotle and Einstein. It sucks perhaps even more that I have much more of a tolerance for Guinness and pseudo-philosophy than water and the real thing. But that's what I'm "smart" at, perhaps. It is good for me that I am among the worst in something that I formerly considered myself to be really quite adept at. This, I suppose, is something like humility. And as long as I'm not proud about that, I think it's good. So my take-away message of the day is that, when you think you're pretty good at something and that gives you a sort of feeling like you could banter back and forth with some other person, secretly gloating about the fact that you probably know a great deal more about the subject than the person talking with you--that's just Pride fuckin' witcha. Kill that shit. [This blog entry was rated PG-13 for brief nudity and cartoon violence.]