T-6005
11-18-2011, 06:55 PM
If you've got it, flaunt it.
Words to live by, apparently, alongside well-loved adages like that one about what your mother gave you. It's an opportunity to broaden your horizons, bounce some ideas, communicate with others and connect on a far more cerebral level.
Either that or an opportunity to rub someone's face in it.
I'll be honest - I find people who feel the need to validate their egos through intellectual fisticuffs tiring in the extreme. They are physically and mentally draining and, more often than not, two-dimensional personalities who view the world in unnecessarily antagonistic extremes.
Having said that, there's nothing wrong with knowing shit. The good shit especially, the stuff that's not only cool to know but that everyone wants to know. You can bust that stuff out nonstop and it's fun.
In the same vein, you can meet people with which you can have a rational - if occasionally strained or confusing - conversation without turning it into a mental pissing contest.
But you already know that's not who I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the people who won't let you end a conversation because they literally crave the last word so much. The people who will jump in to correct you based on a barely overheard comment - and here I don't even mean the girl who sits next to you while you go on about how great mascara looks on lips. I mean the person who hears "...nzania" from the end of a crowded bus and makes their way over to you to inform you that, no, in fact, unlike the DRC it was not under the rule of King Leo.
And then they won't let you go until you acknowledge it.
It's additionally frustrating because - in the main - these types of people tend to marry their personality flaw and superiority complexes to pretty poor sources of information. I am annoyed by many things, but near the top of that long and distinguished list is the experience of being told something wrong, offhand, as if it was a fact.
That's because, you see, I have a flaw of my own. And it's pretty much the same one. No, I don't approach strangers to correct them. No, I don't necessarily contradict people when they indulge in common (or uncommon) misconceptions - though I want to. But when something blatantly untrue is hurled my way as a correction to something someone has said, I find that infuriating.
Of course offhand I can't think of an example. It tends to be the way with these things. Also in the "of course" pile is the acknowledgement that I can't see my own flaws, and the understanding that I'd be far too lenient with myself if I could. I'll own up to that (as long as I don't have to act on it).
I'm not saying you have to research everything you say. But please just try to make it so that the words out of your mouth aren't simply parroted from something someone may have said to you vaguely while walking the other way and actually talking to someone entirely about a subject that has nothing to do with this one. And if you are corrected, please refrain from just snapping back at it. I know you're right. You know you're right. And I'm sure a handy internet or non-internet source will also know it. Take the ten-second plunge into Google's bowels and get at least tenuous confirmation.
Do it for me. Please. I'm suffering over here. Don't you know I had surgery a month ago?
Words to live by, apparently, alongside well-loved adages like that one about what your mother gave you. It's an opportunity to broaden your horizons, bounce some ideas, communicate with others and connect on a far more cerebral level.
Either that or an opportunity to rub someone's face in it.
I'll be honest - I find people who feel the need to validate their egos through intellectual fisticuffs tiring in the extreme. They are physically and mentally draining and, more often than not, two-dimensional personalities who view the world in unnecessarily antagonistic extremes.
Having said that, there's nothing wrong with knowing shit. The good shit especially, the stuff that's not only cool to know but that everyone wants to know. You can bust that stuff out nonstop and it's fun.
In the same vein, you can meet people with which you can have a rational - if occasionally strained or confusing - conversation without turning it into a mental pissing contest.
But you already know that's not who I'm talking about.
I'm talking about the people who won't let you end a conversation because they literally crave the last word so much. The people who will jump in to correct you based on a barely overheard comment - and here I don't even mean the girl who sits next to you while you go on about how great mascara looks on lips. I mean the person who hears "...nzania" from the end of a crowded bus and makes their way over to you to inform you that, no, in fact, unlike the DRC it was not under the rule of King Leo.
And then they won't let you go until you acknowledge it.
It's additionally frustrating because - in the main - these types of people tend to marry their personality flaw and superiority complexes to pretty poor sources of information. I am annoyed by many things, but near the top of that long and distinguished list is the experience of being told something wrong, offhand, as if it was a fact.
That's because, you see, I have a flaw of my own. And it's pretty much the same one. No, I don't approach strangers to correct them. No, I don't necessarily contradict people when they indulge in common (or uncommon) misconceptions - though I want to. But when something blatantly untrue is hurled my way as a correction to something someone has said, I find that infuriating.
Of course offhand I can't think of an example. It tends to be the way with these things. Also in the "of course" pile is the acknowledgement that I can't see my own flaws, and the understanding that I'd be far too lenient with myself if I could. I'll own up to that (as long as I don't have to act on it).
I'm not saying you have to research everything you say. But please just try to make it so that the words out of your mouth aren't simply parroted from something someone may have said to you vaguely while walking the other way and actually talking to someone entirely about a subject that has nothing to do with this one. And if you are corrected, please refrain from just snapping back at it. I know you're right. You know you're right. And I'm sure a handy internet or non-internet source will also know it. Take the ten-second plunge into Google's bowels and get at least tenuous confirmation.
Do it for me. Please. I'm suffering over here. Don't you know I had surgery a month ago?