Things I Don’t Understand
It seems like, when I was a kid, there were a lot of things that I would hear people talk about that sounded particularly “adult” to me…and whenever I heard about them, I didn’t understand exactly what was meant, or how these concepts worked. I didn’t let it bother me. I just figured that when I was old enough I would learn about them and come to understand them. That’s certainly what happened with a lot of things. As you get older you begin to either learn about whatever difficult concept it might happen to be through association, or else you find someone who’s an expert who’s willing to explain it to you. But it seems like, regardless of how old I get, there are certain things that I still just don’t understand, and in some cases, don’t want to. Take the stock market, for instance. For the life of me, I still don’t get exactly how it works, and from what I’ve gathered through my own observations, it seems so absurdly idiotic and the way it fluctuates seems so arbitrary that I would never want to. What, exactly, are stocks, anyway? Well, from what I understand, they’re shares in a company. But they don’t actually “exist,” per say. You can’t hold a stock in your hand. It’s little more or less than an idea…an idea of how much controlling interest you have in a company. But how is it that the value of stocks go up and down? It seems to be in accordance to how much faith people have or don’t have in the company, but here’s where it seems to get so arbitrary to me. You can look in the paper and read about how, since Obama made a speech saying that he was going to impose stricter Wall Street regulations, how the Dow dropped fifty points, and the Index dropped this many…leaving it at some number rather than some other larger number…and oh, what dire ramifications it’s going to have on the country! How the foreign markets crashed because of little faith in the Euro, and how thousands of people are going to become poverty stricken because of it…does anyone else not know what the fuck it all means? Well, I don’t, and I’m not afraid to admit it. I don’t care if it exposes my ignorance, I think there are a lot more people out there than you might think that are in the same boat as me, they’d just prefer that it not be exposed. How is it that stock brokers make millions upon millions of dollars, and are able to afford sports cars, and boats, and luxury condos, when what they seem to be trading in is, well, nothing? They’re trading in ideas, ideas whose value can be determined by people who are continually sticking a finger up in the air to test which way the wind is blowing, and if they think there’s a storm coming, there’s a flurry of activity and millions of more dollars are made…or lost. Stockbrokers seem to me like Chicken Little and his followers. One of them says “Holy Jesus! I just got a reliable tip that the sky is falling!” And one and all they take up the cry “Sell off all our stock! Sell, sell, sell! So-and-so has a reliable tip that the sky is falling!” And then if nothing happens (as is so often the case), the next few days you’ll hear about how the markets are making a gradual recovery, modest gains, until the next crisis, when it all happens again…does anyone else think all of this sounds like complete and utter nonsense? But like I said, these people are making scads of money, so maybe I’m the jackass for not trying to get in with them…if I could ever be made to understand just what exactly it is they’re doing anyway.
Of course, there are some things I don’t know about that have a much more direct impact on me. I still know next to nothing about how computers work, for instance, and, as a writer, not to mention someone living in the modern era who wants to be able to sort of keep up with technology, thereby using email and watching shows online and whatever else it might happen to be, it behooves me to know at least slightly about how they operate. But I hate technology; I’ve always resisted it, and I think I have pretty good reason to. My computer is always crashing because of some worm or virus that I let into it, God only knows how (and its not from watching porn, if that’s what you’re thinking). I might ask someone for advice on how to fix a computer problem I’m having, and I’ll say something like “the thingy at the bottom of the screen won’t light up, and my documents keep disappearing, and it’s making a hissing noise like there’s a nest of vipers curled up inside it!” And then they’ll say, “well, it’s probably because you only have a 2000 volt hard drive, and your CPU motherboard needs more Ram.” And I’ll be at a loss to explain any more clearly what the problem is, and I’ll be equally mystified by what they told me, and I’ll end up just having to pay whatever they ask of me to fix the damn thing.
The bottom line is, some of the things I don’t know don’t bother me, and some of them do. If I never figure out the stock market it’s probably not the end of the world. I’m still not convinced that everybody who has direct dealings with it understands what it is they’re doing either. As far as the other things go, things that I don’t really understand and must continue to ask others about and try my hardest to comprehend their answers, and I usually fail- computers, car maintenance, generally anything to do with banking, etc- I have to just kind of stumble through my life and get by with the limited knowledge that I have. I feel like I was kind of gypped sometimes, like when I got to a certain age the “adult” knowledge that I was supposed to receive was denied me for some reason. But I flatter myself by thinking that just maybe, there are others in a similar situation to myself, and they don’t understand some of these concepts any better than I do, and they’re just nodding their heads and saying “uh-huh” at the appropriate moments…just like I am. I really hope that’s the case. Because if it isn’t, then maybe I’m the only stupid one, and that would be a really disheartening thing to have to accept.