Actually it's more a self-indictment. I'm a science nerd deluxe, having used it most my life to boost my sense of "knowing things" that nobody else gives a crap about.
"Nobody else"? Isn't that an exaggeration? It seems to me that most interests become minority interests when they start to require work, when they get difficult. It's true of any subject.
Then I would fault THEM as being ignorant because they weren't interested in all this information.
I don't think that anyone should be 'faulted'. Least of all you. There's nothing wrong with you, MR.
A few years ago I bought this big book about trees. I had decided I was going to learn all the kinds of trees and be able to distinguish them by sight.
That sounds like me back in the 1970's. I was a biological sciences major and was studying botany. They required us to buy copies of Jepson's
Manual of California native plants. I loved that book and still have my old copy in a box in my basement somewhere. It was a 'flora', an exhaustive catalog of plants native to California, and it included a 'key', a guide to classifying plants in which a series of yes-no questions were asked - does this specimen have a particular characteristic? - If yes, go here, if no, go there. All of us were expected to get get very familiar with that book and very good at using it. Our laboratory final required that we identify some pretty tricky specimens.
Well, for one thing that's harder than it seems. You go by leaf shape, bark, overall shape, etc.
I found it very difficult to identify some of the characteristics upon which Jepson was basing its classifications. You really had to know what you were looking at. That's where the laboratory professor came in handy.
But there's just too many. But what really made me give up was every time I pointed out a kind of tree to someone they were like "so what?"
You were just talking to the wrong people. My fellow botany students would have been very interested in your trees.
The people at the Oregon Native Plant Society would be interested and supportive.
http://www.npsoregon.org/
They have a chapter in Portland. It's only $25/yr and you don't have to be a professional botanist to join.
http://www.npsoregon.org/chapters/po.html
I see from their website that Oregon State University is preparing to publish a '
Flora of Oregon' akin to my old Jepson. It's a major project that will include a plant identification key, an atlas of Oregon plants, cell-phone 'apps' and all kinds of cool stuff.
http://www.oregonflora.org/
I had added to the pile of useless artifactual information that people just don't care about, and it would serve only to isolate and denormalize me further.
Don't be down on yourself, MR. There's nothing wrong with you because you are smart. You just need to associate with the kind of people who can appreciate your unique qualities.
People just don't want to hear you spout your know-it-all science knowledge. Sure, I could just further resent people as wanting to be ignorant. For wanting to live their lives without worrying about which trees are which.
Don't resent them. They just have different interests than you.
But for once I worried about myself. Why WAS all this information so interesting to me? What was I gaining from studying science? I must be using it for something. As compensation for some sort of weakness or inadequacy in myself.
I wonder how many smart kids are taught that kind of appalling self-loathing by their peers. One of the real failures of too many American public schools (not just American, I think it's common throughout the Western world) is the fact that all the special attention is directed at low-end kids who aren't keeping up. There's this widespread idea that smart kids don't need help, support or nurturing, that doing so would be 'elitist' because these kids already have all the 'advantages'. So the bright kids are left to fend for themselves, exposed to and sometimes psychologically damaged by a disfunctional and dangerously anti-intellectual youth peer-culture that makes kids feel inferior because their interests make them seem different. (Being different is the one inexcusable crime in high-school.) And then people wonder why our students don't perform well in STEM subjects.
