I was in the supermarket this afternoon, buying snacks for tonight’s Webelos meeting, when the woman behind me in line started talking to the cashier.
“Do you like mysteries?” she asked. “I just read a good one.”
I concentrated on getting my credit card information into the machine and checking that the machine hadn’t been fitted with a skimmer. When I finished signing my name, I looked back at the woman who was talking: she had her Kindle out and was glancing through her most recently read titles. I guess the cashier was an old friend.
“Have you read A Song of Fire and Ice?” the woman asked. “It takes place in olden times, you know, with knights and horses and spooky things. I think they made a movie out of it.”
It’s a moment like that when I remember we all live in different universes.
Holy moly, I thought, how could you not know that the book series is called A Song of Ice and Fire? That isn’t the name of any of the books at all. It doesn’t take place in “olden times,” it takes place in a fantasy kingdom that never existed. The author is George RR Martin and it wasn’t made into a movie, it was made into one of the biggest television events of last year, a series on HBO?
I haven’t read any of the books (Darin has; he gave up on book 3, as has every single person he’s talked to, so I don’t know who all has been buying Book 4, let alone Book 5, which apparently was the best-selling fiction book of all last year), but I know all of these things. I know Sean Bean starred in the HBO series, and the series kept in The Major Twist that everyone expected them to get rid of (since, you know, they had Sean Bean). I know George RR Martin has a really big beard. I know the series is partially inspired by the Wars of the Roses, but once you have actual dragons in your book, you’ve gone rather further afield than just your inspiration.
People don’t know stuff.
They don’t have to. They still enjoy the world. The world still spins.
Most people haven’t even heard of any of these books or TV series and they’re still pretty knowledgeable about stuff. My dental hygienist bored me to tears while I was in the chair the other day going on and on about the football playoffs, and yet these things she was telling me were extremely important to her view of the universe.
It’s cool when you understand enough about the world that you can explain it to someone else. It’s frustrating as hell when there are things I don’t understand and can’t seem to grok for the life of me, no matter how hard I try. Generally, if I’m interested enough in something, I like learning all about it, and then I tell other people about it.
Sometimes it stuns me when I run across someone who’s enthusiastic about something (as this woman clearly was about A Game of Thrones, which was the top book in her Kindle) and yet doesn’t know very much about it. I wonder sometimes how many times I talk about something called A Song of Fire and Ice and the person next to me rolls their eyes and goes about their business.