Trivial Knowledge

Every Friday, Workplace conducts a trivia contest. A MENSA-type question is circulated on our e-mail group and the first to e-mail back the Office Manager with the correct answer gets to keep the "Really Smart Person Award" bobble head trophy at her desk. The bobble-head has resided at my cubicle on 2 occasions. Bobble-bobble. I only win the word-oriented contests. Never the story problems or geographic questions, even though I'm pretty sure my social studies notebooks from 4th grade are peppered with "Great Job!" stickers at my neatly cursived definitions of plateau and peninsula and gerrymandering or whatever it is you learn in 4th grade social studies. I used to know all that stuff. I probably still know it all, but, as my Latin teacher once told me, "You have all of these conjugations in your brain, Kendra. You just have them stored in certain rooms and you're just not knocking at the right doors." He was kind of a self-obsessed proffy type, but he was right-on in a lot of ways, I realize now. I earned a 97 in Latin that semester, and I'm only telling you that because I remember one Latin expression in full, to this day. "Ecce, Puella." Look, girl. It is very useful, and I employ it in a multitude of professional and familiar situations, as you can imagine.

Look, girl.

I believe that I possess a lot of trivial knowledge, like the section my family parked in when we went to Disney World in 1987 (Minnie 54), the number of ounces in a small cone at Dairy Queen (6 oz.), and the names of substitute teachers I had all through grade school (Mrs. Hook, Mrs. Vavrock, Mr. Gotro). None of this information serves me any use. It will not win me the Really Smart Person Award. It will not help anyone in any way, other than to make him or her laugh at the preposterousness of someone remembering such trivial information.

Most of the conversations or bits of information that I can recall will cause me due embarrassment. Sometimes the things that I remember become a burden to me. The remark you made about the Amish in 1992? The kind of shorts you rocked in 1985? It's all fair game in my mind. I sometimes wish I didn't hoard so much trivial knowledge of fact and fiction in my head. I could use the extra space to store information about where I left my glasses, what my blood type is, what age my sister is presently. But we generally do not get to choose what and how our brains store information.

We can only choose to give ourselves a good Ecce, Puella. A good Look, Girl. Get over yourself. Forgive and forget. And even if you can't forget entirely, perhaps you can just lodge that painful conversation you recorded right next to Clever Uses for Scrunchies, which you won't even have to access, not even on Friday when the MENSA question rolls around.

How It All Began

Most people's true talents crystallize at a very young age. I am sure Lebron was running fast breaks in the womb; I am sure Houdini spent all of kindergarten making the classroom gerbil disappear.

Then, you have people like Carrie Underwood who claim on their myspace page to have been very shy until college when their sorority sisters coaxed them to sing, sing, sing, and that's where it all began.

But we know better. It all began much much earlier.

I consider myself an above-average writer, and have since the 2nd grade when I wrote a story for extra credit about teddy bears who lived in Heaven. The story was called Angel Bears, only, because the initial part of my reading education took place in a progressive school that didn't believe in phonics or making education anything other than standing in a circle and giggling when the first grade Farmer in the Dell picked a wife IN THE FIRST GRADE, PEOPLE, I really didn't know how to spell sometimes. So the title of my story was Angle Bears and my mother read it and laughed through her nose the whole way through it, thinking about the cherubic little angular furballs I had invented. Other than the creation of a new species, though, there was not much to the story. I believe it ended with the following cliffhanger:

And, so, for the bears, it was not such a fun day after all.

Yup. A truly precocious author-in-residence, age 7.

"It's kind of boring," my mother told me. My mother, who was somewhat Victorian when it came to talking about sex, has never held back in talking to me about money or how boring something was that I had written. The way she said it was encouraging, though, in that she knew I could do better. She knew I wasn't a boring kid. I had an imagination, after all. So why didn't I use it.

I'm not sure if I remedied the Angle Bears, but the sentiment that something that I had produced could make even my mother bored stuck with me. Whenever I write, even if it is a report about fungus, even if it is a letter thanking Auntie Do for the new pantyhose, I strive to just not be boring.

I try to write something creative every day. I have kept a journal of some sort for most of my life, and I think that this exercise not only helps to maintain my creativity, but I believe it helps me to treat others better. When I write things down, I meditate. I channel my feelings through appropriate veins instead of through abusive expositions of the maltreatment I received from the first grade Farmer in the Dell.

I think the fact that I am always writing and always revamping also makes me extremely hard on myself and somewhat hard on others in terms of stretching their creativity. I find a lot of new TV shows (i.e. "Notes from the Underbelly," anyone?) to be abysmally cliched. If the writers were my children, I would probably get to the end of the script and pose the rhetorical, "It's a little boring, isn't it?"

And then I would consider the fact that the first story I ever wrote was extremely boring, and full of misspellings, and without that first attempt, where would I be? Perhaps among the clouds, struggling to wrap my arms around the unpleasant geometry of my stuffed animals.

Please Stop Being So Cliched

Please stop telling me that "Friends" is the best show ever, because it's really not that funny, and mostly you would hate every one of those characters -- yes, even Joey -- if they lived in your apartment building across the hall. Please stop naming your daughters Emma and Hannah and your sons Jack and thinking you're sooooo original for doing so. Please stop telling me to read John Irving. Please stop telling me how yoga has changed your life. Please stop bragging about the deal you got on an ugly Coach bag at TJMaxx, like you're the first person to ever think to buy something designer at TJMaxx. Please don't buy Vera Bradley unless you can admit that it looks slightly like something in which your granny would tote her yarn. Please stop talking about backpacking through Europe when you don't even know where you would go to begin to apply for a passport. Please read an etiquette book before you stuff your wedding invitation with gift registry directives. Please stop LOL-ing your way through online chatter. Please stop saying everything is "crazy;" your life is far from crazy. Please don't give me that look when I say that I went to Canada for my honeymoon, and wonder why I flew to get there because "Canada's so close!" It's a big country. Please don't then ask me why I didn't just go to a Sandals resort. Please don't be too insulted and aghast when I respond that I didn't go to a Sandals resort because people like you would be there, and that Sandals and other all-inclusive resorts are only a value for people who drink, which I don't, although swim-up bars do sound wonderful, but only if they're staffed by people who are making a livable wage. Please don't say "irregardless," because it is not a word. Please stop quoting Emerson's "Success" for every occasion that you're called upon to be wise. Please don't decorate your apartment with quasi Art Noveau posters of Napa Valley. Especially if you've never been to Napa. Please don't buy the Audrey Hepburn calendar just because you saw "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and don't know anything else about Audrey Hepburn. Please stop blaming the church for your Catholic guilt if you are living in sin. I'm not judging you, but guess what? No one can make you feel guilty if you're confident in your decisions. Please stop claiming that you've discovered a food item from Trader Joe's. Did you "discover" it? Hidden? Behind some back order of inventory in the nether heights of a dark and dusty warehouse? Or was it on display in the grocer's freezer? Please stop recommending that I look on craigslist whenever I need something; I'm familiar with Craig, I just thought you might be able to help me more than an online forum of derelicts on house arrest. Please stop hating on Maureen Dowd just because she's a woman who happens to be right a lot of the time. Please stop forgetting to vote and making excuses for not voting; that's unconscionable. Please stop hearting everything. It was cute for a while, but let's restore the heart to its proper noun-ship, shall we? Please stop starting blogs and never updating them. Please stop reading this blog and never commenting, especially you. Please stop being so cliched.