I resolve to treat life with “Fear and Ignorance”

Annie Savoy: The world is not made for people cursed with self-awareness.

Crash: Look, Nuke — these Big League hitters are gonna light you up like a pin ball machine for awhile — don’t worry about it. Be cocky and arrogant even when you’re getting beat. That’s the secret. You gotta play this game with fear and arrogance.

Nuke: Fear and ignorance.

Crash: No. Fear and arrogance, you, hayseed, not ignorance.

Nuke: I know. I just like to see you get all worked up.

I’m way too in love spinning stories about my inability to get along in the world. People wind up thinking that I’m hundreds of times worse off or uninformed than I really am, while confident morons who haven’t got a clue wind up moving to the head of the class.

When I was in college there probably wasn’t a single class that I wasn’t at the top of by a wide margin intelligence wise (wow, look at that immediate shift into arrogance!).

Anyway, at the beginning of nearly every class I was usually a mess, because I thought the class was so hard. Eventually, I realized that I was the only one with that perception, because I was the only one who knew enough to realize how hard the class could have been had the professor wanted to make it that hard.

One class I took that was supposed to be a Mickey Mouse class was Highlights to Astronomy and the material could have crushed anyone. I was freaked out trying to learn it all, but by the time we took a test I realized that we were only being tested on like 1% of the material. The professor was pretty hilarious. He knew that no one took the class seriously and would often say things like, “We’re going to launch the Hubbell telescope and the amount of new information about the universe that will be available to us will be staggering, but all of you are too busy getting drunk to care.”

Time after time, I’d walk out of a class blown away and I’d turn to someone else and say, “Did you understand that?” They’d immediately say, “Sure, it was a breeze.”

Then I’d ask them a couple of questions and realize they hadn’t grasped a third of what I had.

One time I couldn’t do a homework problem and asked someone if he had been able to do it. He was 100% sure that he had done it correctly. I looked at his work and said, “This is all very nice, but he gave us an equation to do the problem with and you didn’t use it.”

Another time, I was living over in Berkley and needed a place to live. I was making a fortune at the time, but since my hours were so bad, I decided it would be fun to live with some other people and expand my social network.

I went to meet these three young kids, who probably combined weren’t making half as much as me. While I was looking at the place, I was telling jokes and mocking myself, and how I often used to be too lazy to pay my bills on time. So they of course decided I was a laggard and didn’t rent me the place. I suppose it makes sense, but if I were living with them I’d just hand them a check, it wasn’t like the tons of paperwork I hated to fill out.

So from now on I resolve to act like the cockiest bastard on the planet.

Although, this post has probably made me look bad enough that I’ve already failed. C’est la vie.