Smarter Than Thou

There's a very thin line between being an expert on a subject, and being obsessive.

Me? I'm very, very far away from that line. I'm not an expert on anything, and I know it. I have a very general sort of knowledge about a lot of things, though, and it makes me look smarter than I am.

My general knowledge comes from a natural curiousity in me. I read all sorts of things, whether they interest me right away, or not. I've read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and when you do that, you pick up a lot of useless facts.

(No, I'm not going to list any. There are entire websites full of them, all over the net.)

...and with the general knowledge making me look smarter, I feel bad I know something someone else doesn't. It makes me feel like I'm some sort of show-off, and I'm not really.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love the spotlight, when I decide I want it. In high school, I kept myself in the spotlight among my friends as much as possible, because that was who I was at the time. Now, I'd rather be a bit blurry, and only come into focus long enough to crack wise, smile charmingly, and fade back away.

I feel bad when I look smarter, because I know it's not right. It's a lie! I'm just an average schmuck, who happens to be a halfway decent writer. (At least that's what I'm told. I'm not sure I believe it, honestly. In my mind, I'm just an average writer with just a little more drive than other average writers.)

Maybe I should just give in to it, and become snooty. I can make some elitist friends, and stand around talking about things in general, avoiding any subject I'm not decently versed in.

Nope. Don't think so. I'd rather stick out like a sore thumb in a room of real, average people, than be surrounded by fake posers. (Oxymoron, anyone?)

Give me your stoners, your role-playing nerds, your band-that-will-never-go-anywhere members, and let me be their friend.

At least they'll be real with me, even if they think I'm too smart for them.

A Snippet of Anachronism

I love this kind of music, and I don't even really know what to call it.

I'm listening to the Ultimate Pink Panther soundtrack. Some of it is jazzy, some just odd, and of course, you have the orchestra arrangements.

I think I ws just born in the wrong time, or something.

Most everything I like is old. I love old movies and old music. Most of my dream girls are all dead from old age. I think it would be awesome to wear a fedora in public without being (laughingly) compared to Indiana Jones.

Then again, I can't be all anachronistic. I do like some (rare) new music, and a few of the dream girls are still alive, and reasonably young. It just puzzles me as to why I like the stuff so much.

I think part of it might be my parents, (and this is not a bad thing in any way), who had me late in life. I came along thirteen years after the other kids, had very few friends that came over to play or lived close enough to do so, and so I spent a lot of time alone. That's not a bad thing either, really. I think it forced me to develop one heck of an imagination, which is awesome, since, y'know, a writer needs one of those.

For what I consider my "formative" years, we lived in the country, and we didn't get many television channels, or pick up any radio stations very well. So, I delved into my parent's record collection. Percy Faith, Her Alpert, Roger Miller, the (early) Beatles, Roy Orbison, and so many others were my music.

I blame the old movies on my parents as well. Okay, it's not so much blame, as gratitude. My father, as many of you know, is a preacher, and so we didn't watch movies with bad language, nudity, violence, or anything like that, and that was okay. Doesn't bother me that it was like that. I watch things with that stuff now, of course, but starting out with those restrictions meant that basically anything in black and white was safe.

Abbot and Costello don't cuss, y'know.

So, my most basic sense of humor, ideal of female beauty, and a million other things were influenced by old movies and music.

Well, I guess I'm not so puzzled, after all.

(Look at that, another entry where I've answered my own question. I have to stop that.)

Age, Wisdom, and the College Crowd

Someone told me about a person they knew recently. This person was an older lady, say, in her 50's, I think it was. Every time there was a discussion about anything involving this woman, she thought she always knew the right way to go, (and was wrong quite often), because she was older, and therefore, knew more about everything than the younger people around her.

WRONG!

Just because you are older, doesn't necessarily mean you're wiser. That's a ridiculous assumption.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the college kids, who think because they've had a class on something, or got their degree, they are instantly the fount of all knowledge.

WRONG AGAIN!

Both sides are wrong. Both need to realize that they have different types of knowledge. The older people have life experience, but often they try to base every decision on a subject on their personal experience with something. Take, for example, lawyers. If they had one bad experience with a lawyer, they're going to assume all lawyers are scumbags, and should never be trusted.

The same goes, in a way, for the college kids I mentioned. If it was in the textbook, or a teacher said it, it must be true! The sky is yellow, darnit, because the book said so!

In the end, it really comes down to the fact that no one knows everything. Which is a good thing. If someone knew everything, he'd share the information with everyone else and the world would become very, very boring very fast.

The mystery is what makes life good!

So all you college punks, are you listening to me?

Your moral of the story is this: Listen to your elders, and take their opinion into account. Don't decide it's wrong just because they don't have a degree.

...and for all you older folks, turn up the hearing aids!

Your moral of the story is to listen to what those young'uns say, too. That book-learning that you never got, cause you were picking cotton so you could feed your twenty brothers and sisters? It's good for some things. Life knowledge isn't the only useful knowledge.

It kind of makes me wonder what it'll be like once the generations who didn't go to college are gone. Will the Doctorates and the Bachelors fight over who knows more, and whose knowledge is better?

Maybe the new "cotton fields life" will be found in the community colleges, where they worked hard to make it in community college to help feed their twenty brothers and sisters.

I donno.

I do know this, if I don't go to bed, I'm going to fall asleep on the keyboard.

(...and go read the novel! It's the reason I'm sleepy!)

Oh, and one more thing. Yesterday was my birthday (the 13th). Yay me. I'm 25. That's a fourth of the way there. I hope the next 25 are a little more exciting. ;)

The Mock of the Beast

People take everything too far.

No matter what it is, there will always be someone who takes it to a whole other level.

Want an example? Fine. Out of boredom a couple of weeks ago, I was flipping around the radio, hit a talk station, and started to listen. The program on at the time was about computers, and technology, and the host was a tech guy from a local computer store.

They were talking about the mark of the beast.

It took me a minute to really get what they were talking about, and then I just stared, dumbfounded at the radio for a good five minutes. Apparently, the host had brought up a news story about how they can implant a microchip into a person for various reasons, but specifically the article he quoted was about the usefulness of such a thing during a kidnapping case, or etcetera.

That was enough to bring the nut-jobs out, and the caller who was on the air as I tuned in was making reference to how he would never let anyone implant on in him, because it might be the mark of the beast!

I cringe, I moan, I sigh.

Come on, people, use your minds.

"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666" (Rev. 13:16-18)."

It's just a microchip. It's not a mark. No one is forcing anyone to get a microchip in their heads, and the ones they were talking about had nothing to do with being able to buy or sell things.

See? That caller took it to a bad level. He went too far with something. All of the conspiracy theorists and "the end is near" nuts do that.

...and you know what? It drives me insane. I can't for the life of me understand why people can't just live their lives without looking ahead to the end of the world. Especially the crack-pot end-times obsessives.

I don't know.

I'm looking all over the place, following links as I write this. I just came from a guy's website about the microchip/barcode mark of the beast, and, through his links page, to this website, which he claims as his favorite website out of all the links on his page.

...and he expects to be taken seriously? The antichrist and Mars?

I can't think about it anymore. I'll just start ranting about morons, and that won't do any of us any good.

Ugh.

A Snippet of Addiction

So many creative outlets, so little time.

With the comic, the new novel in thirty days thing, and the blog, I'm blowing creativity out my ears!

That's good, though. Really. There's nothing more fulfilling than creating something. Bringing something into existence from nothingness, or a jumble of things.

I'm not talking about kids. Some people think instantly of popping out little people as soon as you say creating something is a beautiful thing. I don't want children, at least not for a long time. It's not that I hate kids, I just don't need them around now. My patience is paper thin with the cats, much less children.

At least the cats can't talk back. Well, that I know of.

So, here I am, just oozing creativity, and it's like a drug. I need more as soon as I get something really rolling I see something else and I just have to do it, have to try it out.

Hi, my name is Corgan, and I'm addicted to creating.

That's right. I'm hooked. I got started on this blog, and it grabbed me. As many of you know, I've spent literally hours tweaking the html, playing with the colors, and trying to find new nifty little tricks like that changing header.

I tried to branch out and make more blogs. That didn't really work.

Then I found out that I could have my own web-comic. For a while a few years ago, I tried coming up with my own comic, but in more of a book form, that involved the skull-headed character that is in Many Tidings Grim. The path was as follows. A certain someone sent me to a web-comic, (I think it was Penny Arcade, but I could be wrong), that had a link to a comic called Girly. With a little wandering about, I found Keenspace, and started obsessively doodling.

Thus, creative outlet number two was created. That got the juices really flowing.

Then, I magically stumbled across the National Novel Writing Month, and I couldn't resist. It was a way to get a novel going and prove to myself that I could do it, and that I might just be able to pull an idea together enough and stop obsessing over pointless details and actually have something solid to show for it that was over ten pages long.

Wow, that was a long, long sentence.

So here I am, frantically trying to keep all three up and loving it. I could do this for a living! Well...yeah...I guess that's obvious, since I want to write for a living, but the comic thing, that's a surprise.

I'm even thinking of changing my minor to Art.

Yep. Now I'd better go write a little more on the novel, and then attempt to get another strip all prettied up for the web-comic.

Save your interventions, this is a blast.