Sunday, April 19, 2015

Leave Me Out of It

According to my blog statistics page, which is visible only to me or I would share it with everyone, right now two people in Croatia are reading one of my posts. This interests me on many levels, the main one being that I know nothing at all about Croatia -- not where it is, how the people live, what they eat or anything -- and so I cannot imagine why my thoughts are of interest to the average Croatian, if that's what they are called.

My husband enters the room and I ask him what he knows about the place. He says it is "formerly part of Yugoslavia." I demand more, and he says, "That's basically all I've got, you better Google it." Seeing my disappointment, he pushes himself and comes up with, "It's across the Adriatic from Italy, north of Greece, south of Rumania." (He's very good with geography.)

Does it matter? Should we know a lot of random stuff? Why? I can't come up with one reason besides "showing off," a popular activity I find to be almost as pointless as knowing where countries you will never visit or interact with in any way are located on a map. Yet so much of what goes on every day can be attributed to that very thing: Trying to impress other people with how smart we are, how much we have achieved, and how superior we are in every way.

I prefer doing the opposite. If you make it clear at the outset that you know next to nothing about a lot of things, you can just go about your business and let everyone else fight for the prize. (This is not recommended during job interviews or if you are running for political office.)

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