Prepoceros

At the wifi-enabled teahouse in which I sit, there are several fish tanks. For the last three hours, I’ve been watching (via a large mirror on the wall in front of me) a man clean two of them behind me. Cleaning a fish tank isn’t something I’d ever given much thought to, as I’ve never had fish, but it’s a rather involved process. Hoses and filters and chemicals and lots of scrubbity-scrub.

At intervals, the fish’s apparent owner came out to chat with the guy about all sorts of fishy things: tank size, water temperature, all the different types of fish they’d owned, etc., and I was struck by the depth of cleaner-dude’s knowledge. To my untrained ears, it sounded as though he knew EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD EVER about fish.

I’m fascinated by people with vast specialized knowledge—the niche-ier, the better. Many people, perfectly ordinary-looking people when you first meet them, have these deep wells of knowledge. Whether it’s comic book superheroes, black-and-white photography, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, beer brewing, remote-controlled airplanes, quilting, polo ponies, blackjack, geocaching, or fish tanks, there’s *something* they could talk about for hours.

You yourself are probably an expert in some narrow field or other. Maybe you’re a global authority on the topic, or maybe you just know more about it than your friends do. Maybe it’s related to your profession or your schoolwork; maybe it’s “just” a hobby. Maybe you have several unrelated narrow interests; maybe you have a habit of picking them up, studying each one voraciously, then moving on once you’ve learned all you can; maybe you’ve done this one thing your whole life. Maybe this interest defines who you are; maybe you’ve built your life around it; maybe your friends don’t even know. Maybe you’re part of a community of like-minded people; maybe you’re still waiting for *anyone* to understand what you’re talking about.

See, I think that’s nifty. Life is too short to do everything, but you can do THIS THING, and you’re FUCKING AWESOME at it. I think that sort of deep knowledge would make the world seem a little smaller, a little more manageable, a little less overwhelming.

Do I have a thing? I don’t know what mine would be. There are certainly bucketloads of things I *don’t* do, and the things I do do I generally do well*. I imagine that’s true of most people.

But really, what’s my special thing? I don’t watch sports. I’m not a dedicated fan of any TV shows. I don’t play video or computer games. I don’t read a lot of books in the same genre. I’m not a regular on any messageboards. I don’t collect anything. I don’t know how to clean a fish tank.

I’m good at math, but I don’t know that that counts as “specialized.” Lots of people are good at math, and math is tremendously broad anyway. I’m quite good at grammar nazism…that’s getting warmer, I think. I teach for a living (part of a living, anyway), but I’m not an expert teacher any more than the girl who made my tea today is an expert tea-mixer.

The best “specialty” I can come up with right now is my aptitude for and knowledge of standardized tests. That still doesn’t quite fit, though, because I didn’t get to be good at taking tests by studying them. I’m just…good at it. Being a natural test-taker isn’t in the same league as devouring everything you can find about Yankees baseball or the Spanish Inquisition until the knowledge seeps out your pores.

Or is it? I do like standardized tests, and I do read about them, and I do know more about them now than I did when I was, say, ten. Is that enough?

My second-best candidate is YouTube. I know much more about YT than the average person does, or at least I did back when I used to post on the site regularly. My just-above-novice skill in video-editing is not innate but was learned through many, many hours of trial and error. When, in real-life conversation with non-YT friends, I bring up something that happened on YT, the conversation sometimes breaks off into awkward silence. Maybe that counts as specialized knowledge. Nobody said a specialty had to be useful.

Maybe this is my selective memory talking, but I remember my younger self being more into niche topics, more fascinatable. I was more willing to invest time in something that didn’t have an immediate payoff because hey, I was a kid, and I had all the time in the world. Nowadays I spend most of my time dealing with mostly-boring day-to-day stuff, and I while away the free time I do have in a scattered, incoherent fashion. Shouldn’t I have goals for my non-school, non-work life? A hobby, a project, some sort of outside interest?

In his spare time, my brother builds boats. My dad fixes up the house. My mom reads. My boyfriend rides his motorcycle** and tinkers with his computer. I sit in front of my computer, flitting from site to site, reading or skimming articles on a whole gamut of topics. I add bits of knowledge here and there, but with no focus, no coherent purpose. For all that time spent, I have nothing to show but a list of bookmarks, most of which I’ll never pull up again.

Sometimes I post to my blog, but again, with little coherence. It’s about…me. Scatterbrained, unfocused. Some people blog *about* things. I just blog. It’s a decent way for people I know to keep up with me, it chronicles my life for my narcissistic, nostalgic self, and sometimes it’s an outlet for stress, but beyond that…what?

I realize that not everything in life has to have a purpose or a final, tangible product (and I also realize that I’ve now kept writing long after I had anything on-topic to say), but it would be nice if *some* things did.

Oooh, wait wait, let me mention something from the intro so it sounds like this wandering was all part of my grand bloggy plan. Did you know that you can clean the corners of your fish tank with a toothbrush? It’s true.

———
* How’s THAT for grammar, eh?

** when it’s working, and rebuilds it when it’s not.

Tags: math & puzzles, teaching, YouTube

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 6:04 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.