I have this constant, low-level fear that I really don’t want to know anything – that I’m simply going through the motions and finding out where information is kept, but resisting building a knowledge base in any particular area because I’m just too lazy to bother. I have many proof points for this assertion, including my bizarre ability to skim a bunch of stuff and then sound like I know what I’m talking about. It just seems suspicious that with a shallow understanding I can convince people that I’m knowledgeable about just about anything, but I have yet to store a reasonable quantity of information about any specific topic.
However, today at work something just happened that causes me to think I might be redeemable. My boss asked me what the child poverty rate in Texas was, and I *knew*. It’s a very small fact, and I couldn’t tell you any others off the top of my head, but it was a fact, and I knew it. I didn’t just know how to find it. I knew it.
It was cool.