Don't know much about

Wheat says I have to say geography. I told him that it should be history. Between us we've now recited the whole damned song, and the sad thing is that it has nothing to do with anything I was going to say here.

I do know what a slide rule is for, though.

I've never used one.

I'm not quite as old as the hills, no matter what they tell you.




Is this a good time to say that I've been up since three in the morning and it isn't a good thing that I have to be functional this evening? I'm supposed to be doing something or other that has to do with stars. I'm not exactly an astronomer at the best of times, and pretending to be a half-assed (well, not literally) astronomer on less than four hours of sleep is likely to prove... interesting.

My cold and I aren't getting along, in case you were wondering.

Anyway, the star thing takes me marginally closer to having a topic. Scary? Yes. About the topic, I mean. I so rarely have a topic.

The topic today is that I don't know much.

I am, by nature, a compulsive researcher. I always have been, from way back when my parents would tell me to look up the answers to whatever subject was taking up too much of my brain in the encyclopedia.

Not that my brain was in the encyclopedia. My head was, much of the time, but that's something different.

For the kids out there, encyclopedias were sets of books that had short articles on a variety of topics. Kind of like Wikipedia, but slightly more reputable.

Anyway.




Where was I?

Oh yeah. Not knowing anything. What I was going to say is that I used to be more or less a specialist as to my own personal learning style. I'd get interested in a subject, learn a whooole lot about that one topic, and then move on to the next interest.

Serial obsession.

As opposed to cereal obsession, which is a whole 'nother problem.

Serial or cereal, I don't get to do it any more.

Obsess about one topic to my heart's delight, that is.





Sorry, my brain's currently flailing about like a seal lost in a penguin colony. The noise, the smell, the little people in tuxedos...

What I'm trying to get to is that in my job I have to be a generalist. I need to know a few things about a lot of subjects, instead of knowing just about everything about a few subjects.

This is completely against my nature, and I've finally figured out that it's the reason why I feel so frigging inadequate most of the time. Well, one of the reasons. There are, no doubt, more. This happens to be the one on my mind today.

It doesn't matter that I might know more about a particular subject than eighty percent of the people in my audience, or occasionally even ninety percent. I usually don't know enough to feel like I really know the subject, and it makes me extremely uncomfortable to have to present something that I'm grey around the edges about.

Obsessive little freak, remember. It's tough for me to just fly with what I know. Goes against the grain.

Kind of weird that I'm in the business of doing exactly that then, don't you think?




And if you do think, what does it feel like? I'd like to try it sometime, but I'm not sure my head could handle the stress today.

See you in a couple of days, folks.

Sleep or no sleep.







I'd prefer the former, if you're taking orders.