No Real Title
I like to think of myself as a pretty knowledgeable and intelligent guy, because all modesty aside, I am. I spend a lot of my time just learning, reading article after article, book after book on topics I'm interested in. Though, a lot of what I know I learned through experience, not necessarily study; regardless of the source, a solid 95% of the knowledge I actually use I learned not in school but on my own.
Perhaps it's not a change in my status and I'm simply noticing it more now, but it's apparent that almost nobody I know respects me. Or, perhaps, they make up their mind before they ask me about
, and when I show them that thus and such isn't really what they think it is, they either ignore me or argue with me and piss me off. Whichever, it's akin to the feeling an expert testifying before the Senate must feel when he's consulted for symbolic reasons only, his opinion ignored and his hard work snubbed. It makes me feel worthless.
I take pride in my intelligence, but as I believe intelligence is only partially earned (genetics aside--my parents are both very intelligent and so is my sister--I did teach myself in some fashion to think the way I do and utilize my intelligence in a smarter fashion, no pun intended), I take a much greater pride in my knowledge. An excellent example is my grasp on the English language. I'll readily admit that it's almost entirely intuitive, because by the time I was taught the mechanics I already knew how it all worked, and only made a token effort at learning the 'science' behind it, as it were. I'm not trying to say I could waltz up to a graduate level English professor and show him what's what, but I've never needed someone to show me how the language works. I learned that on my own.
Another example is my ability to spell, which I attribute to an understanding of the pronunciation of the language. If you understand how each group of letters is supposed to be pronounced, you can spell, it's that simple. There are some exceptions, as always, such as Tucson (when my family was talking about spelling at some point, my mother tried to trick me by asking me to spell Tucson. Ha! I showed her.) Be tough and memorize them, punk. It's not that hard. Spelling errors make me cringe, and there are only a few people I know that spell very well these days.
How did I develop both of those skills? One word: reading. I began reading real books in second grade. The first 'real' books I read, books which are not necessarily adult but can easily be enjoyed by adults, were the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. I still go back and read them from time to time, and the series has been expanded from five or six books (we had the first four, I believe) to seventeen novels to date. I'm not going to say they're great works of fiction, because frankly they're not; there are common themes in each book, and the good / evil clash is very black and white, but they're also very enjoyable, very well written, and the sort of creation that inspired me to write as well. I highly recommend them, and if you allow yourself to believe in the characters, there are some very emotional moments in there that just thinking of bring a tear to my eye. Actually, I first read Mossflower, which was chronologically the first book at the time, and when I found out the main character from that book wasn't in Redwall, chronologically the next, I was heartbroken. I was also seven, but you get the idea.
This is turning from a self-sorry rant to a meaningful post, so I'm going to continue in the thread I'm in now. I figure meaningful trumps feeling sorry for myself.
I recall in high school when people actually thought it was 'dorky' to read books. People couldn't believe it when I would be sitting in the library at lunch or during a study hall reading a book with eight hundred or a thousand pages. They actually could not conceive of reading a book that long, ever. That attitude is pretty sad for me to hear, though almost nobody I know besides my sister and cousin Kim ever reads. I know a great many people that have never read a book outside of school for the enjoyment of it. Shallow television and movies have trumped the written word, unless it's in Seventeen or Rolling Stone. Pathetic. If you picked fifty people at random from my high school class, I'd give myself excellent odds that I've read more books in my life than they have altogether. I can look at my bookcases and see about a hundred books right there, with another fifty or sixty scattered around, and this is only a fraction of the books I own, let alone have read. I have another three hundred books in the basement, and I ran up quite a few late fees on my library card over the course of my adolescent life getting out half a dozen books every week. If I had to pick a number of individual novels I've read, I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand or more, and novels only make up about half of my reading material. Not to mention how many times I re-read those novels.
One class of reader that annoys the hell out of me (like my friend's brother, who's a fucking snob when it comes to literature) are people that look down on anything that wasn't written fifty+ years ago (bonus if it's translated from Russian), seven thousand pages long, and written in some esoteric style that you need a god damn translator for. Or better yet, some long winded statement full of recurring themes on the nature of man that ohmygodshouldhaveendedfivehundredpagesago. Look, guys, if you want to make a deep statement, don't couch it in prose that's so incomprehensible that I throw the book out the window in frustration, and don't ignore the structure of a novel. There is such a thing as having a good style, and you're doing yourself no favors by making your work unreadable. Nobody's going to read it but English grad students if it's not reader friendly, because someone like me isn't going to put the time in to read your dumbass opinion if you don't respect me enough to write it in language I understand. When your prose is more unreadable than the tax code, you're making a mistake.
I've lost my purpose for this entry, so it's basically a bunch of crap that has no real point. It lacks cohesion and focus. Sorry.
