I also have a trivia-master boyfriend (he could win like crazy at Jeopardy - we watch and he knows every answer). He knows something about EVERYTHING. And tons about his area of interest. I can only manage to remember stuff about my obsessions, sadly.
Easy, fellow poster. No stress. I can answer some of this (I used to be able to answer more; its funny how you forget what you don’t use occasionally) and what I can’t, others can. Time is your friend, as are others who post here. Sure I crack wise, but so does everybody once in a while. Iphone has a phone to get the data or a wifi receiver to uses a PCs wifi broadcaster/receiver modem. An Itouch just has the wifi portion. Courses that take 90 minutes to teach this patronize. Courses that intend to teach you more than this assume you are actually going to screwdriver open your IMonolith and attempt to swap out/repair parts. And lets face it: Steve Jobs face twitches if he sees you reaching for a 2Mg Sandisk card. If he thought you could open/repair/modify his Istuff, his head would explode like the Deathstar (but with better graphics and extended slow-motion features only available through the Istore). It would be … well … Ipocalyptic.
And you shouldn’t yell at yourself. I yell at myself enough for the both of us and since somebody should get some enjoyment out of the resulting down time, it may as well be you.
That’s a good point. An excellent point. There are things that just don’t interest me, and so there’s no incentive to know them. But there are thousands of things that do interest me (I’m kind of a Jack of all trades, master of, well, just a couple). The one outlier to this, though, is the example that I mentioned earlier: popular culture. Most aspects of it are meaningless to me, but I do enjoy some television series and lots of movies, but despite my enjoyment of same, I have no idea who anyone is.
In a lot of ways, where I work seems like Highschool, with all the common sense that we remember it having. Its more of an “OOOOoooooooo! Did you see what she put on Facebook? OOOOoooooo!”.
(Its a sound I remember hearing in school auditoriums when they’d turn off the lights for some presentation or another.)
I’m not totally up to snuff on most pop culture stuff, either. And for the most part I’m cool with it - I’m on such a wavelength that I wouldn’t enjoy most Hollywood intrigue even if I tried to follow it.
What’s awkward sometimes is when my parents know more about certain pop culture things than their 28-year-old daughter. For example, there is this commercial where Bear Grylls puts some meat ponchos on some guys, they get chased by wolves, and at the end Bear sees which guy’s deodorant worked the best. I think it’s funny because of the way that Bear dead-pans the whole thing, but my mom actually had to explain to me why the meat ponchos were funny (something to do with Lady Gaga? IDK). She also knows more about the Black Eyed Peas than I do. Did you know that Will.i.am is the one with the plastic Borg hair? Or that there actually is a guy who calls himself Will.i.am?
This. World of Warcraft? Dragon Age? Anything that requires a console? Confounds and bores me, really. I’ll gladly play Tetris but that’s about as far as I can take it.
I’m also awful with higher level maths. I can do really concrete things like solving quadratic equations, but trigonometry broke my brain and I didn’t even attempt calculus. Before I finally get my degree I’m going to have to take college algebra and probably statistics and I’m freaking terrified.
Can I join those clubs? Whenever anyone says “so-and-so looks like (insert famous person here].” I am clueless. Movies from about the mid-70s and before I can identify the actors in, but any later than that and I can only identify Shelly Long and Bob Hoskins. As far as sports go I’m almost hopeless except for the occasional bit of obscuriata I’ve managed to retain over the years. I know that the Dodgers started out as the Brooklyn Trolley-Dodgers but I couldn’t tell you when (or if) they won the World Series and where they are now (I know they’re no longer in Brooklyn).
I was in my mid-forties before I figured out the probable origin of the phrase “water the dog”. Up till then, I’d never had a dog that drank from the toilet. I knew it was supposed to be a running gag, but I just never made the connection.
Can I ask why Shelly Long and Bob Hoskins are the only two movie stars from the last thirty years that you recognize? They seem like two unusual exceptions to a general lack of knowledge about movies.
Team sports, except maybe baseball. I love the Olympics, but I could watch a thousand football games and never know the difference between a tight end and a half-back. And what’s with those huddles?
I promise only to list things I care that I’m ignorant about.
Economics - I had an economics class my freshman year but I slept through most of it, and now I really regret that because I don’t know as much as I feel I should. My understanding is limited to a few popular books like Freakonomics and Nudge. I’m especially interested in so-called behavioral economics. I tried to get into an economics course this semester but it was full.
Business- I know less about business than I do about economics. Another thing I feel like I should learn as I am strongly interested in the successful operation of non-profits. I may return to school for an MBA at some point. I am fuzzy on a lot of basic financial concepts, particularly investing. And I have investments, so that’s probably not good.
History - my knowledge of basic world history is pretty awful. I couldn’t tell you hardly anything about WWI or WWII. I know they involved some European countries and rawr! communism. We bombed Japan at some point. I’ve taken a few history courses but they were focused on very specific issues - like the Spanish Civil War and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile. I really need to get my hands on a good world history book.
Alright, that was pretty embarrassing. No sneak bragging there.
Just about everything about being an adult. I see commercials about mortgage/insurance/loan stuff, and I start to go cross-eyed. I’m going to apply for a loan at some point and I’ll have no choice but to tell the representative to speak to me as though I am five years old. I hear about folks who, say, move to London from the US, and I’m all “how the fuck do you DO that?”
Also, something more specific, physics and chemistry. BASIC physics and chemistry. I work in a museum that has galleries where these are central themes, and I’m scared to death of working in them. I realize that most visitors who ask questions about these things don’t want a lecture, but I know so little that I wouldn’t even be able to give them sound bytes.
For example, I only just recently learned that you’re not supposed to mix bleach and ammonia. I saw threads on the web that were all “OMG DON’T EVER DO THIS NEVER EVER EVER” and I’m thinking “um…okay? Why?” Then I googled it and learned that apparently that makes mustard gas. Well, okay then. I’ll have to cross that off the list, I guess.
One more thing I’m ignorant about: any sort of Victorian/Edwardian purple prose writing. I read it and I have to reread paragraphs several times before I get it. It irks me that if I were magically transported back to the 19th century I’d probably be labeled a simpleton, but there it is. (Actually, they’d probably say “oh, you’re just a woman, you wouldn’t understand.” And then I’d punch them in the face.)
