"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six I did."
I like math. It's not like I'm Asian or anything. I don't spend my weekends memorizing the digits of π in an effort to compete with Lu Chao, and take the world record. I don't send emails to math professors asking for unsolved equations to toy with when I'm bored. I'm not Will Hunting, I just like math. I think it's interesting. Surprising, when you consider that the furthest I ever bothered to go with math was Calc/Trig (I list them together because I took them in the same semester) I understand the basics of almost all well-known collective mathematical theorems. I tend to stay away from things that only an engineer would need, but I've been known to secretly read a text book when nobody is looking just to learn something outrageous and new.
Lately though, when showcasing my math-knowledge, I've been poked at. You'd be surprised how intimidating math is. Some people have gotten downright mean with me in fact. Surprisingly, not even as a result of especially rare, or complex math. For instance, while working on my post about how I hate Netflix customers, I was doing head math to calculate how many DVDs we process on a given day for the sake of said post. I was talking to myself trying to memorize the numbers, during a break, and my coworkers started commenting on my math skills, and asking me if I'm some sort of freakish Asian calculator. This of course led to the sense of ostracism that I had in elementary and high school when I knew how to spell the words that other kids had nightmares about. Asian-hating aside, it seems a bit silly that grown men and women are so willing to ignore, fear or outright hate knowledge.
When did knowledge become something to fear as an adult? You'd be amazed at how quickly somebody will jump on the offensive or go to their, 'kill-it-with-fire' place because you've given them a piece of information, or provided them with knowledge they didn't know before. God forbid you tell a 'Wiccan' that they're using the word incorrectly, or God super-forbid you mention that the religion itself was developed and formalized in the 1930s and most scholars agree that it has nothing to do with prior anthropological evidence about duotheistic religions. I'll admit it, I can be confrontational at times, but I never pass on knowledge in an effort to make people feel smaller than me, and in fact, encourage people to give me new information to fill up my head. I figure I'm not using all of the memory space in my brainputer, so why not learn more. What better place to learn more than from other human beings?
I have lived by,and celebrate the fact that I know a little about a lot, and a lot about a little. The areas where I perform highest are in Music, Math, Language, Psychology, and Religion. These are the five areas that I have put huge amounts of time into, and really they're all tied back to the fact that music is my life. I find lately though, that the more people I meet, the more I realize that most people don't even know a little about a lot. Most people know almost nothing.
The old adage that knowledge is power, seems to be considerably less prevalent. When did high school, or college, mean the end of education? Are Katrina and I the only people I know who read for the sake of knowledge, and engage in wiki-suck purely for the sense of joy it fills us with to know that the unused space in our minds has been filled with newness? I sure hope not, because if we are, then I'm pretty sure than things are going to get really ugly really fast.
I sure hope that my friends, the people that I entrust with my future, are worthy of such trust. Here's to hoping that we aren't alone in our never-ending quest for knowledge. Let me be the first to say that if you ever need to learn something new, I am always available to give you a drop of knowledge. likewise, if you ever learn something fascinating, and feel like sharing, my brainbanks will gladly take your deposit.
