06.30.08

I’m most likely not smarter than a 5th grader

Posted in The days, traveling for work at 11:59 pm by Beau

It comes as a sad and shocking revelation about the poor quality of my current standards of knowledge.  Case in point, while in Omaha last week, a city poised on a river that separates it from Iowa, I paused to reflect on the lack of anything remotely resembling flooding.  Sure the banks of the river were muddy and silted but wasn’t the Mississippi River suppose to be surging it’s banks well past historical cresting levels?

Well, yes it is…two states away, separating Missouri from Illinois.  I just happened to be standing at the banks of the Missouri River as I was contemplating the flooding while in Omaha, eyeing the very close casinos perched on the banks of the river on the Iowa side.  Of course the thing that makes this even worse, as if that’s possible (and not only is it possible but more embarrassing) is that I actually lived in St. Louis on the banks of the actual Mississippi River for a year after college….so I know, or evidently knew, exactly where the Mississippi River was/is and it is not, contrary to my initial survey, the river between Nebraska and Iowa.  Sigh.

To be fair, my teammate, Rob, correctly identified the river this morning when I asked, albeit as a complete guess, “ummm…maybe the Missouri?” which I then validated the answer via Google.  Thank Jeebus, I didn’t pick up the magazine at the airport this morning with the lead article “Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” or I’d never have been able to google the answer on my Blackberry.

And then, just now, feeling somewhat better about actually knowing what river I’m going to be running next to and/or gambling next to while we’re in OmaHaHa, I was reading through Newsweek which had a map of the US with some states highlighted and while I went right to Nebraska, I had to start some mental gymnastics to start naming the other states….specifically all the states in the South, which has always confused me.  The conversation started off as “Nebraska…so the one ot the right is Iowa and below that is….hmmm….well, to the right of Iowa right there at the split would be Missouri so right below Iowa is Kansas….then…Wow, Oklahoma is soooooo close to Kansas and then there is Texas.  Now, hmmm, that’s the boot so its Louisiana and right above it is….mmmm…I’ll come back to that one….to the right of Louisiana is, now is that Mississippi or Alabama…well, Max lived in Alabama and he used to drive two hours to Atlanta for CD’s so that must mean he was right next to Georgia which is there so I’m going with Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, then Alabama, then Georgia.  HA!  Arkansas is above Louisiana!…so Georgia there and well, that’s Ohio up there which makes that West Virginia so Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina Georgia….”  And on and on and on. 

I mean, for Zod’s sake, was that three minutes of ridiculous mental association to figure out the Southeastern US?  if I’d had a CNN camera and mic stuck in my face for some expose on declining educational standards, would I be that douche in a suit they show, hemming and hawing, notable to point out our nation on a globe?  Unfortunately, probably yes.  Also, I cannot spell so the televised national spelling be gives me hives.

This is all to say, I’m in one of my knowledge upswings that starts happening around this time of year.  The upcoming election starts internal conversations where I ask myself “how did we get here?” and I start re-reading “1776″, hoping to not only finish it this time but move into biographies of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin in a vain attempt to actually work my way up to the Civil War.  I am not so hopeful as to believe this time will be much different, especially with the competing affections of DC’s “Final Crisis” and Marvel’s “Invasion” series.  I do however, give myself credit that I can recognize the concern and lack of knowing and want to be better for it.

Perhaps on my next flight, I’ll actually start tackling the states to the north and west of Nebraska.  But then again, there are those four damn states that come together at their corners and I can NEVER keep those straight.  So there is that.

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