Myanmar was once Burma, now it's Myanmar not...
a column by Chris Jungle

I'm now standing at a crossroads I never thought I'd see. It's not 18th and Vine, Haight and Ashbury, or even Kathryn and San Mateo. There are two streets I'm talking about are Intelligence and Ignorance. I've been wandering on Intelligence Street for a long time now and have passed Ignorance on several occasions and even window shopped on it a few times. Now, I'm wandering if it's time to switch avenues, or if I've subconciously changed already.

There was a time when people actually considered me bright. Of course, that was during a time when a person's intelligence was based on whether they were in the Advance Placement classes or not. Once I got thrown into society, the reality set in that one can not survive on the knowledge of calculus, passages in The Scarlet Letter, and the Periodic Table.

Every place of employment I've ever worked at reqiured a lot of on-the-job training, figuring out the system, and basic social phrases like "How are you doing today?" and "Oh, I really don't have an opinion on that." Over time, a person can master their job to a degree where they are proficient and even considered a good worker--possibly even an intelligent worker. The same goes for attending college or graduate school. People hone their skills and knowledge on a small area of information and become eligible for doctorates and such.

I fell into the former category believing I could retain all of my intelligence and still be a decent employee for people. Unfortunately, I was drastically wrong. Things I used to know as fact have now crumbled, and the ignorance has spawned and festered within me.

The first sign of ignorance came when I glanced at a world atlas and found the country Myanmar. Apparently, the country I'd been calling Burma my entire life (mostly for papers on the drug trade) had up and changed its name. Now I'm suddenly baffled at why such a change occured. One part of me wants to investigate. Was it a government overthrow? Was it voted on? What does Myanmar mean? The other part of me wonders why I should even care about such a change. There aren't going to be any tests on the subject. It's very doubtful that the conversation would ever come up in my group of friends and co-workers. As much as I'd like to say my conscience rose to the occasion and sided with the intelligence portion of my brain, it instead decided to flip through the television channels wondering if it would rather watch the NBA Playoffs or the NHL Playoffs.

Now, I hear the British government is Labor heavy again. Is nothing sacred? If there was anything I could count on, it was that England would be Conservative until the day I died. And while there's this little mole in my head eager to dig for all of the articles on Tony Blair, the rest of my cranium is contemplating whether it would be a good idea to put chili powder in my Mountain Dew for flavoring.

Nobody likes to admit that getting older means they care less, but it's true. I still remember my grandfather telling me there hadn't been good music in forty years. That meant he'd been musically ignorant since the fifties. I'm not to the point where I won't ride the information superhighway, but it's likely that I'll get pulled over for driving too slow. As they grow older, people tend to be much more selective about what kind of information they process which makes them more ignorant to everything.

I'm not really confident about my decision on which path to take because no matter which way I go, there is a lot of room for second guessing. Maybe when we get older, we just get tired of learning the updates. Remember when the universe consisted of just the sun and nine planets? Those were simpler, merrier times. Now, we're expected to know this galaxy and the four ones around us. Remeber when all we had to ask for was beer because we were underage, and we had to take what we could get? Now, we have to make are own choices and are cursed with the knowledge that some beer is much better than others. Knowledge is both a blessing and a nightmare. So now I stand at the crossroads between choosing to keep on learning even after it means nothing to anyone but myself, or shutting down and letting my ignorance take over. I think I'll take the road less traveled.

Chris Jungle has been reinstitutionalized and spends most of his time debating with his therapist whether Tibet is a country, a mountain range, or just a state of mind.

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