Yes, I am cursed. For as long as I can remember, at least since high school, I have been cursed by knowledge.
Before any of my friends respond, “you just think you’re smart,” let me say that I have never considered myself to be super smart. In fact, one of my exes clocks in higher in the IQ department than I do, and no it’s not the one who thinks she’s smart but isn’t.
We were extremely competitive too when we tested our IQ. She beat me by about four points and given her career arc, I can see that she was indeed the smarter of the pair. And that’s fine. I am very proud of her as well as my significant other now who just finished her MBA, something I would never tackle.
Actually, the Curse of Knowledge has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with learning. I am and have always been a bit of an information sponge. I just suck up knowledge like the Noonoo on the Teletubbies. (yes, another vague reference to pop culture, stuck in my head forever).
That’s pretty much how I see me, but with a moustache. I simply know too much and knowing too much can be a very dangerous thing.
It’s one of the reasons why I got the job title “Mister Know-It-All”, another relatively obscure reference unless you had a thing for The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. That was one of Bullwinkle’s character. My counterpart, my ex, was Fearless Leader. I always liked her title better than mine but when we parted, I couldn’t take the title. It was hers, not mine.
I really wish mine had been Mister Knows-A-Lot, but that has absolutely no frame of reference, and as such, is pointless. But it is perhaps more accurate. My brain is like a card catalog of randomalities, a word that is made up by the way, but so descriptive.
As I’ve noted before, all this information just seems to bump around in the dark space between my ears, like the balls in a pinball machine. Occasionally they hit the jackpot, more often they Tilt.
At first glance, having a Curse of Knowledge may seem like a really cool thing. You know a lot of stuff, some of it really useful (tying one’s shoe comes to mind) and other pieces totally useless, such as the address of George Jetson’s house (Sky Pad Apartments, Orbit City). None of it can really be categorized or organized. It’s just there, nagging at me, taunting me, and on occasion, mocking me by rising to the surface, begging to be blurted out at the least opportune time, one that makes me sound as if I am totally nonsensical, which I can be without any help whatsoever.
What’s wrong with this, you ask? Well, there’s a definite downside in having this curse. You simply know too much. Someone can be telling you a story and you already know the end. In a meeting, you can be discussing some big project but you already know it won’t be approved. You can be 10 minutes into a movie and know how it turns out, including all the requisite plot twists. You have friends whose lives are going to be a total train wreck but you can do nothing to stop them from running right into the brick wall that only you seem to be able to see. It’s just one thing after another and you can’t do anything to change any of it.
It really makes you feel helpless sometimes. It’s akin to being a parent. You tell your child not to stick his fingers in the fan and he’ll just do it anyway. All the lessons you’ve learned are for naught. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not.
Sometimes you can see the result years out. Other times, you don’t get a lot of warning. Case in point. I knew last November that Obama is going to win in November. Sorry, my Republican friends, but you don’t have a candidate. At least one that can get the votes of the key voter blocks – mainly Independents, Hispanics and women – required to win an election. You already lost the race.
Don’t blame me for this doomsday prediction – it’s the Curse of Knowledge. It’s the same one that told me that the car my ex had just purchased – our only new car ever – was going to be a real dog. Even though it was highly rated by Consumer Reports, something told me that a Daewoo Nubira wasn’t a good choice. It wasn’t. The company went out of business like a month later. The same thing happened to the next ex when she insisted she buy another Saturn. What happened? Well, I think you know the end of that story.
You’d think that having the Curse of Knowledge would have at least been beneficial in my own life. Well, yes and no. Though I know up front something will be a cluster f***, I feel like I have some sacred duty to see it through to the end, if for no other reason than to add to my repository of vast knowledge – useful and useless – so that I may continue to see the writing on the wall, serve as an early warning system to my friends, and then bang my head against the wall when they inevitably don’t listen. Oh, be able to kick everyone’s ass in Trivial Pursuit and Jeopardy, of course.
Out on the Treasure Coast, filling my head with more nonsense as I write this,
– Robb