No Know-It-All

One of the strangest things I dealt with during my first year of college was the number of people who told me I was smart. In high school, if anybody thought I was smart, they never said it to me, and in my family, I would never be called smart due to my habit of losing things and not being able to follow simple directions. Yet in college many of my friends, roommates and even some of my professors indicated that I was smart. This naturally threw me for a loop, until I read an article in Esquire by AJ Jacobs. Jacobs is the author of The Know-It-All, a story about his quest to read the entire encyclopedia, a quest he fulfills. The facts he picks up are disparate and usually pointless, but it makes for an interesting read because Jacobs is very funny and writes it knowing that the excercise is both bizarre and comical. I, while not being smart, am like Jacobs in that I have an enormous warehouse in my mind brimming with irrelevant shit. I am constantly busting out facts about Austria, high fructose corn syrup, the 22nd Ammendment, and a host of other worthless crap. It is this collection of trivium that I think is confused for being smart.

To me, being smart requires powers of analysis. I can look at data and remember it pretty well. I don't know if I have a photographic memory, but sometimes it seems that way. So while I can recall the data that was in front of me, I usually cannot solve the problem asked of me. Knowing a little about a lot of things, in my mind, hardly makes me smart, but rather makes me scatterbrained and useless. I have a lot of interests, and I am a very curious person, so I spend a lot of time navigating the paths of wikipedia, not really learning but taking in facts about the election of 1824 and the Suez Canal. When it comes to subjects like history, it was always easy for me, because most classes you take about history before college are just remembering what was in the story and repackaging it. This was right up my alley as it required no real skills, but a great chance to be a poseur and an intellectual ass, two areas where I excel. Now I am an economics major, and while I lack analytical skills, I can usually detect causality. How this all plays out remains to be seen.

The point (which I've long since lost in my ramblings) is that I greatly respect smart people. Understanding how things work or having an analytical mind that can solve problems are seriously valuable talents. If I were smart, I'd feel like the standard and responsibility that often comes with intelligence would be cheapened by some college schmuck who spouts off arcane nonsense about Augustan literature or the geology of Death Valley. I'd probably kick him in the face.

I hope I've made my point, which is that I'm not smart, but I am like AJ Jacobs and know a lot of unimportant stuff which makes me SEEM intelligent. By the way, if you're an attractive girl who is "into" smart guys, this entire post was one huge meta self-deprecating farce and satire. Honestly.