Correction.

Accuracy is important to me, and yet it feels as though at least 50 percent of what I say needs to be fact-checked and usually corrected. Every other conversation or show has me on Google doing research.

This would make me really smart if I remembered ANYTHING that I look up or absorb. Instead, I spew out half-remembered, half-digested tidbits from various sources, just trying to get through a conversation.

This is true especially at work. I was in a meeting recently with two people where we briefly digressed about the merits and drawbacks of Rotterdam. My colleague was complaining that the food wasn't very good there. I have never been to Rotterdam but took this as my opportunity to note that in a documentary I just watched about Michelin-starred restaurants (what movie? I can no longer recall), I was surprised to note that two of the restaurants were Dutch, including noma.

My colleagues nodded politely, clearly not giving a shit but indulging me anyway. The meeting went on. But while we talked about the details for a video shoot, I realized: Shit. Noma is not Dutch. It is Danish. Shit! Wow. How could I have messed that up within the space of one day? And everyone is just proceeding as if what I said were true.

What if later they find out it isn't, and then they say to themselves, "What? That dummy Christina told me Noma was in the Netherlands, and now here I am in Rotterdam psyched for the most unexpectedly awesome meal of my life, and it turns out to be a sham, all because of her IDIOCY."

I had to issue a correction, but there was no good point in the conversation. We got further and further into work items and restaurants were floating increasingly far behind in the conversation's trajectory. "Just let it go Christina. Who cares?" I told myself. But my compulsion for accuracy would not relent.

We were standing up, concluding the meeting, when I interjected, a propos of nothing, "By the way, Noma is not in Rotterdam. It's in Copenhagen." My colleagues both momentarily gave me a look that said, "What the hell is she talking about?" Then, polite as ever, they recovered. "Oh! Haha! Okay..."

God. Why do I manufacture these awkward moments?

Music: "What's the Use"