Currency

Euripides begins the Trojan Women with Poseidon and Athena arguing over the fate of the surviving Trojans. The whole exchange is ripe with lack of explanation, that is, if you walked into this conversation with your standard high school education you'd have no idea what is going on. This Greek fellow expects you to have read at least Homer's Iliad if not the Odyssey. If you have not, this little Greek tragedy would confuse you worse than Willis was over Arnold's stupid catch phrase garnering him such praise.

It is because you are lacking in anecdotal currency. The stories that people tell, the sports events that they watch, the voyeuristic video docu-dramas that try to look like news programs and even the news programs that try to look like news programs, all contribute to a person's anecdotal currency. These shared experiences will show the telltale signs of your leisure activities thus establishing just what sort of fellow you are. We will share these things in conversations and be considered cool because we know them, or (if you are a male) because you can quote every line of the movie that you just watched word for word (that is, all the cool lines, you won't need to actually quote the romantic lines as you'll be using those on women and they rarely get the lines right anyway).

When we were kids we had baseball cards. We could actually trade the ones we didn't stick in the spokes of our bikes to make them sound like motorcycles. The kid with the best baseball cards was the coolest. Until of course baseball cards were no longer cool. Then the kid with the best baseball cards was the "weird kid who collects, ew, baseball cards still". Of course now that kid can sell his baseball cards for plenty of cash and buy friends who don't think he is weird. Baseball cards are just physical manifestation of anecdotal currency. Each card represents a player who people either think is a bum, overpaid, or a legend (this has always been the three classifications of baseball players). If you don't quite understand the baseball cards analogy, just substitute the word "Pokemon" everywhere in this paragraph where you see the word baseball (but then the idea of paragraph is probably a little foreign to you as well)

Nowadays, the "cool kid" (the term here for kid means college graduate in a professional work environment, which by the way has a great deal to being a kid because this is what we wanted to be as kids, free, able to drive, no curfew and loaded, in some fashion or another) must have a wide variety of anecdotal currency at his finger tips. To be wealthy in "cool bucks" one must be fully educated on current events, retail furniture stores, independent films, sports (both obscure and mainstream, but you must enjoy one very non-mainstream sport that is reported on ESPN 2) and at least one vice (vices may include beer, wine, liquor, tobacco or the opposite sex). You must have your stories, quotes, jokes, and observations ready to go at moments notice. To hesitate is to think, and to be cool, you must not ever think.

What I've found funny is that people approaching their 10 year high school reunion tend to place a great deal of worth on topics that they studied in high school. Try dropping Dimmesdale, Mrs. Patchwithers, or Atticus Finch into your conversation with the next 28 year old you meet and just watch the glee with which they jump to the conversation. Try discussing that with an 18 year old and they'll look at you like you just informed that you were the real Alf.

You see, while anecdotal currency has a shelf life over the short run, over the long run it becomes a thread tying them back to the miasma of the "something old days" (We say that, because as yet, they still don't quite seem good, they just seem to have some better points than today. It will take years of bitterness, complaining about "these kids today" before they become the "good old days".) Those with too much green (new) or ripe (ancient) anecdotal currency run into the risk of being labeled "gay" or worse intelligent. You will then be expected to produce the stuff on demand at parties for the amusement of beautiful people so that they can in turn tell stories about when they heard you telling stories.

And what's worse than that was the time I was talking to Stephen Hawking and one of the Gallo brothers about watching sculling on the Chesapeake over a couple of single malt scotches and Federico, I think, says "You know I have this Sandy Koufax rookie card (Bulbasaur's Secret Garden card) in my basement that I used to use as a book mark to show where Boo Radley takes out Bob Ewell in my favorite book."