Categories: uncategorized
Date: 02 September 2009 13:25:33
I was wrong. When someone asks me a question, I'm often torn between the impulse to want to help, by answering the question, and the impulse to be honest and admit that I don't know. (There's also another pull, which occurs every time I consider opening my mouth, which is to try to say something funny, regardless of whether it answers the question or not. Fortunately, after twenty years of practice, I can mostly keep this under control). Of course there are those rare occasions when I can actually be honest and helpful, if I actually know the answer. But those are rare indeed. I suppose, as well as wanting to help, if I'm asked lots of questions (by, for example, someone who's actually trying to get a conversation out of me), all of which I don't know the answer to (because, let's face it, the number of questions I know the answer to is dwarfed by the number I don't know the answer to), it becomes tedious and frustrating for the questioner, so again my impulse is to try and give some variety by actually giving an answer to the question, with diminishing regard for its correctness. Even when I do actually know the answer, it turns out that I'm often wrong. Frequently this is due to my hopeless inarticulacy - I seem to be able to specifically say that I'd like tea rather than coffee, and have this understood by everybody present as me expressing a clear preference for coffee. But often it seems to be because wires have been crossed in my brain, so that facts I've absorbed have become reversed in my head, so that what I know to be true is often the opposite of what is true. For whatever of these manifold reasons, I often find myself wrong. And I don't like it. I'm fed up with it. I can't exactly put my finger on why it frustrates me so, but it does. Obviously some times it matters if I misinform someone, but even when it is totally unimportant my reaction is the same, so it is simply the being wrong that seems to annoy me, not the consequences of it. It often gets to the point now that if I'm asked a question then I'll actually be reluctant to answer because it's so likely that my answer will be wrong, leaving me with the same shoulder-shrugging feeling that I get when looking out the curtains in the morning, knowing to expect rain, and finding that indeed it is raining again. That's actually a good point of comparison. The likelihood of rain, and of me being wrong, is high. The actual impact of both is quite low - I spend most of my time indoors and have a good raincoat, and my wrong-ness rarely matters. And both really frustrate me.