My dad's always tried to expose me to cultural influences, most of which he'll drag me into kicking & screaming but will thank him for afterwards. It helps to impress your bosses when they make obscure references to '50s or '60s movies and you understand it, or vice versa. It also helps when you're watching Zoolander and the film spoofs a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey and it turns out you're the only person in the entire packed theatre who's seen it because you're the only one laughing hysterically.

Part of my "education" included several trips to various museums in New York. One bright morning, Dad & I hopped a train to New York and set off for the Museum of Modern Art. Now, I've never really been an art fan. Paintings & pictures, they're nice to look at if they're done by friends or they're of things you know and can relate to. But that's about the depth that I can get into them. And as far as "modern" art goes... well, I never really understood the rationale behind that. So a whole afternoon looking at paintings at the MoMA didn't exactly excite me. But I went anyways, if only to appease my father.

So we're standing there in the MoMA looking at a painting done by the esteemed modern artist Jackson Pollock. It's a long rectangular canvas, about 2 feet tall and 4 or 5 feet wide. It's a white canvas with a large red stripe down the middle of it, but the stripe is a little messy and there's blobs of paint around it. It's worth $4 million.

I remember standing in front of this monstrosity, wondering who in hell would pay more than $10 for it and why it was hanging in a museum. I looked at it again and thought it looked like Pollock dipped a 3 year old in red paint and allowed the kid to crawl across the canvas. And I don't know what was more mortifying for my father, the fact that I said this out loud and then asked "why in God's name is this worth $4 million?" or the fact that other museum patrons heard me say it, then came over to my dad to tell him what a smart kid he had.