I Have To Do What?

I'll spoil the surprise up front.

I have to learn.

I can't help it. It is something genetic, I guess, because I have no choice in the matter.

Place, skill, person, art, language, culture, my curiosity is overwhelming.

I am really not sure if it is a Gift or a Curse, but if there is something going on around me, I cannot rest until I have absorbed all I can about it. It does not make any difference if it is knitting or hand grenades, inquiring minds want to know, ya know.

The Gift part is easy...when something is broken, I have probably already seen how to fix it or something very much like it before, ergo, no mystery there. The toaster is on the fritz? Not for long if I'm around.

The Curse part comes from having a bunch of relatively useless information rattling around inside my head.(Wanna know how a slide rule works? I gotcha covered. Now that is gonna come in handy some day!) Not to mention my total inability to enjoy watching someone create a masterpiece without trying to figure out how it is done.

On the plus side, I have learned some pretty cool stuff. I can pop an Abalone off a rock at low tide and serve it for lunch 10 minutes later. If the pilot of our jumbo jet is incapacitated, there is a reasonable chance I can land the damn thing. I know the difference between a Diffenbachia and a Bromeliad. I know when to hit and when to stand, most of the time. I know where the little man in the boat lives, and what makes him happy. I can tell you the difference between Pahoehoe and A'a. I can tell you the 4 types of booze needed to make a Screaming Orgasm. Wanna go for a sail? I'm a fair to middlin' skipper, although what that has to do with cotton, I'm not sure. Most of this is useful, to one degree or another.

The sad part is that my idea of a good time usually involves something like a little visited corner of a Calculus Text, a crackling fireplace, and a cup of java. Sweet! Or maybe substitute a foreign language text(is it true that if you can invite someone to sleep with you in another language, that qualifies as being fluent in said language?). Speaking of Calculus, our old friend Newton developed the beast at about the same rate that students learn it from books today. Amazing!

I have to admit that I am quite jealous of the scientists of yesterday. The men and women who discovered the simple stuff. We stand on their shoulders today. And while it might seem easy to have deduced that the Earth revolved around the Sun, today we don't have to worry about being tortured for teaching such blasphemy. I think it would have been fun to carry a barometer up a mountain and figure out that air gets thinner the higher you go. It seems one needs a gene sequencer or a superconducting supercollider to do any meaningful research these days.

Don't let me convince you that I consider my learning disability to be a handicap. The only problem is one of focus. I majored in twelve different subjects, but have degrees in none. On the other hand, I am sure that had I settled down and chosen just one, I'd have been a miserable failure. Let me sing you a song while I paint you a picture while I cook you a meal while I deliver your child while I mend your clothes while I build you a fire while I write you a book while I build you a house while I open your eyes while I take you to bed while I show you the visions that dance in my head. Wait...where did I put that book?