Pangaea, and Other Things I Never Knew I Never Knew

“Useless information.”

This is what my daughter informed me the other day, when we were on our way to the supermarket. She told me that she knew a lot of “stuff”, but most of it was essentially useless. She just found it to be incredibly interesting.

I had shared with her that I suffered from the same malady, which began in childhood. I’d glean information from books, stories, television news broadcasts, newspapers – you name it, I stored it, in my little categorized brain. I loved to find out silly tidbits that really made no sense to anyone else, because I thought that they were brilliant conversation starters and enhancers.

Not to mention that I have always been a bit of a nerd.

They are excellent ways to get a conversation going, these tiny particles of knowledge. Take, for example, a conversation that Bree and I shared, the night of our supermarket excursion. It went a little something like this:

Me:  “Before I die, I’d like to go to Scotland. Put it on the ‘bucket list’.”

Bree: “And England. I want to go to England.”

Me:  “Okay, England too. I just don’t have the cash flow right now to book a flight overseas.”

Bree:  “Yeah, I wish Pangaea still existed.”

Me:  “Pan-what?”

Bree:  “Pangaea. It’s the name of the landmass that held all of the continents. They slowly drifted apart, and became separate continents. But in a few hundred years, we will have a Pangaea Two – the continents are slowly drifting towards each other again.  If Pangaea existed still, we’d be able to just take a drive to England and Scotland.”

Me:  “Wow, that’s pretty cool. I knew that all the continents were once one, but I didn’t even recall what it had been named. Pretty impressive.”

Bree:  “Yeah, that’s me. A store full of useless information.”

Now, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t think that this was useless information at all. I found it to be an amazing tool that brought us into a conversation about different things that we knew about seemingly uninteresting topics. For example, I could tell you, on any given day, the breed of a dog or the type of bird that’s sitting on the branch of a tree. Bree added to this by mentioning that she, too, can identify different types of flowers, grass, trees and bushes. She added, with a chuckle, that she kind of freaked out one of her friends at school, a few weeks earlier. He wanted to go sit under one of the trees in the large botanical garden on campus. She questioned him with, “Oh, the oak?” He gave her a quizzical glance and said, “How’d you know that?” She shrugged and said, “I don’t know – I just do.”

Years of poring over nature books as a child probably assisted my daughter in understanding different species of flora and fauna. As a child, I used to do pretty much the same thing – I’d sit for hours with the encyclopedia set that my grandmother forged for me weekly at Bohack’s. I couldn’t get enough of learning about what minerals were indigenous to certain states. I loved to learn. I suppose that’s why I really enjoyed school, while everyone else pretty much disliked it.

My daughter shares that love for knowledge. As a child, she knew she wanted to be a teacher, because she wanted to impart knowledge and help to positively affect young minds. She also liked to know a lot of “stuff”. Her playtimes were also quite classroom-like in nature. For starters, she would sit her stuffed animals down, lined neatly upon her sofa in her room, and she would form a lesson plan. Please don’t ask me how she knew what a lesson plan even was, or what one looked like – she was four years old, and hadn’t entered school yet. She had a book, she had papers, she just knew. As she got older, and her interest in nature increased, I purchased books upon books of “useless information” – from which she gleaned great go-to facts. Bree learned which black bird had red stripes on its wing (red-winged blackbird), which dogs are best with children (Labrador retrievers and golden retrievers, as well as a slew of others), and which trees made the “itchy balls” (sycamore). One day, I found her, drawing a spot-on picture of a dog with her crayons and colored pencils. “It’s a Bernese Mountain Dog”, she informed me frostily, when I complimented her on her lovely picture of a “dog”. I was pretty much reduced to a “little Fred”, as seen on episodes of “The Flintstones”, when Fred became embarrassed.

I’ve found that said “useless information” has helped others, as well. A friend had asked me, one morning, what type of yellow bird had been perched upon my fence and had flitted away when I exited the house. I knew, immediately, that the bird had been a pine, or yellow, warbler. (I’d also seen it, so I had an edge.) Not so useless, considering the fact that I also believe in animal totems, and that certain animals have messages for us at certain times in our lives. The message that my friend received that morning was one that yellow warbler brought to him: embrace all of ones’ self in order to become whole, and do not deny either part of ones’ self, neither the good side nor the not so nice side. He actually seemed relieved, since he had been wrestling with something the night before, and this was an “answer to a prayer”.

We should never tell ourselves that we are bearers of “useless information”, for we never know whether or not someone might actually need some of that knowledge for an issue in their own lives. For example, my nephew is a bit of a botanist. I always thought that the trees in my yard were really large arborvitae, based on the frond formation. He informed me that the larger ones were “white cedar”; this information actually assisted us in the removal of one of the trees, which had fallen down during Hurricane Sandy. Useless information, indeed. It made a world of difference because the stump was much heavier and the wood was much denser and more difficult to cut.

There are a great deal of websites online these days, that are a tremendous source of knowledge that isn't truly necessary, but is fun to learn about. For example, did you know that you cannot inhale through your nose and talk at the same time? Okay, so it isn't rocket science, but I'll bet you tried it, didn't you? One website, www.totallyuselessknowledge.com, has many categories dedicated to things you didn't know, probably didn't care about, but would make you sound quasi-intelligent at any function.

The next time you’re at a dinner party or seated among friends, instead of listening to everyone else chat, how about planting some seeds of “useless information”? You might just surprise yourself by finding out a few more bits of knowledge that you might not have known before!