The Octomom

I resisted knowing anything about the "Octomom" for as long as possible. However, like most of the detritus floating around the interwebs (and television - God save us from the 24 hours news cycle) at some point it becomes a choice between ignoring the world completely or learning things you would rather now know. Enter the Octomom. Now I know her name (Nadya Suleman) and the fact that even though she has no means to support herself and already had several other children she convinced a fertility specialist to help her spawn a litter. She also allegedly has an Angelina Jolie fetish. The attention that's lavished on this nutbag is just fuel to the fire. If I could just excise the Octomom's existence from my mind and replace her with something useful (what's actually going on with health care reform, anyone?) I'd be a happier person. Will she get a reality show? Won't she? Why should we care?

The Wish to Unknow

The mind is a terrible thing, facetious and capricious. Think of all the things that you know. The things that are intrinsic to yourself and your identity. Things like your name and age. Those things you can't imagine forgetting because they help make up who you are. Then of course, there are the things that should be important to us or useful to remember (mathematical formulas, people's birthdays, the capitols of all fifty states) that either slip away almost as soon as we learn them or dance tantalizingly out of reach as soon as you need to recall them. You know you know the answer, but you can't manage to get it out.

Then of course there are things that we somehow know that we wish we had never ever learned. These are the things we want desperately to unknow. The sort of information that make you yearn for the brighter and happier place your life was in before you realized that this new bit of knowledge had taken roost in your mind and you would never be rid of it. This is going to be my tribute to all the things that I wish I could go back and never ever see or hear about. The things that once known, can never be unkown, no matter how much I try to pretend.