567 Nothing.

I’m feeling acutely aware of my own ignorance at the moment.

My internet service has been just barely functional for several days now.  I can’t be sure, but it seems like it happens whenever it snows.  Of course the whole thing makes me realize that I don’t really know how the internet works.  Maybe more people are inside surfing for porn since it’s cold outside.  Maybe it’s some other cause.  I don’t know for sure if a lot of people on at once actually causes the net to be sluggish.  I think I heard it someplace.  It’s one of those things I take for granted.  Treating it like magic I go through little rituals trying to appease the gods of service.  Unplugging things, plugging them back in, uttering curses.  My lack of understanding causes me to revert to a base creature, pleading to invisible beings in the sky for aid.

Past a certain vague understanding of things all my technical knowledge breaks down basically into blind trust.  I know that when you use a phone waves travel through the air, somehow find receivers, and then somehow make it all the way to whoever you wanted to call.  I know that if you hook a battery to a wire electricity will try to escape across the easiest path.  If you become the easiest path it shocks the shit out of you.  How that simple concept turns into the computer I’m using is less clear to me.  I understand with most things that if you do A then B will happen, but I don’t know the why necessarily.  Now that I’ve stopped to think about it I find that it bothers me not knowing.  I feel like if I did know the why of things I’d be better prepared to help myself when trouble arises.  Of course I can’t tap the well of all human knowledge because my net is, for all intents and purposes, down.

I know a lot of random stuff.  The value of my knowledge varies greatly from item to item, but to other people I seem smart, well spoken, and reasonably skilled.  Compared to all the things I’m ignorant about, however, my knowledge is as close to nothing as makes no odds.