For Halloween, I was LaGuardia High School, obviously the premiere public performing arts school in New York City. Alma mater of household names like Liza Minelli, Timothée Chalamet, and Nicki Minaj. The inspiration behind the hit 1980 movie musical “Fame,” whose title song now serves as the hold music for the high school’s front office.

My costume came on the heels of my discovery of LaGuardia High School through my other obsession with the same name: LaGuardia Airport Terminal B (which, if you must know, was my Halloween costume the previous year). Because you keep insisting, I’ll let you in on a little secret: LaGuardia Airport Terminal B has a 25-foot, state-of-the art fountain that plays Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” every 15 minutes. And darling, it draws a crowd! 

This is all besides the point, but it’s also absolutely not. Going on tangents and exploring our interests shouldn’t be a one-off that distracts us from the point. Oftentimes, that’s the point itself.

When I got to WashU, I was shocked by how often people were trying to capitalize on their hobbies, even in good faith. It seemed like every interest had to be labeled and identified as a valuable skill or a reason to be in a club or résumé-building knowledge. An interest had to be monetized and put to use. But nurturing the bone in our body that is hungry for “useless” knowledge helps us just “be” rather than focusing on constantly commodifying and marketing ourselves.

A lot of us think of ourselves as curious; 95% of Americans proudly wear the label. Sure, we use that curiosity as fuel to be our most involved, engaged selves when we are in lectures, in Zoom meetings, and making the best dinner — and that’s great. But not all of this curiosity should be treated as finite fuel to get our boat from point A to point B. It’s OK to ride the waves, look at the reefs, and sometimes submerge ourselves in the water (make an elaborate felt LaGuardia High School costume).

Pursuing random knowledge can take a multitude of forms: the late-night YouTube video essay, the dinner table Wikipedia deep dive, the Google search wormhole. Regardless of form, the creation and later storage of that seemingly miscellaneous knowledge is important. Experts argue that this knowledge base manifests as cultural capital, making it easier to converse casually about an array of topics and make unexpected connections while learning new content.

Cut to this past summer. My family is sitting around the dinner table, and my sister is outlining her marathon training plan (couldn’t be me… so much so that it famously wasn’t). My dad jokingly remarks she’ll never be as fast as Rosie Ruiz. We’re all confused. “Who?” we said. He explains that good ol’ Rosie jumped the gate to join the race in the last half-mile of the 1980 Boston Marathon, finishing without a bead of sweat in a record time of two hours, 31 minutes. We doubled over. Rosie, nooooo!

That night, I dived head first into the Wikipedia wormhole. How did she have the audacity to tell reporters she “woke up with a lot of energy” that morning? Did she even consider trying to memorize the route so she could answer suspicious questions from the crowd? Did she have to embezzle $60,000 from the real estate company where she worked two years later? So many questions, Miss Rosie!

This random knowledge has by no means revamped my worldview, but it’s one of many fun anecdotes that I can hold onto. These anecdotes are like flowers in a field. Plucking those wildflowers and braiding them into a flower crown doesn’t quite have immediate tangible value (we’re not opening an Etsy storefront here), but it’s just plain fun. Plus, we get to share those crowns with others and look back with nostalgic warmth on our thumbs sticky with dandelion petals.

It’s not everyday that we hit gold in the conversational mine. To me, LaGuardia and Rosie Ruiz are straight diamonds that only got sparklier when I carved them down by learning more. But, we can nurture our “useless” curiosity in small ways. To me, that looks like listening to my favorite pop culture and remotely long-form news podcasts, checking out a ragtag group of books from the library, and fully immersing myself in niche reality shows. I love these random worlds and for me, this curiosity doesn’t kill the cat, it keeps it all the more alive.