Last week somebody was talking about some obscure topic, which for the life of me I can't remember at the moment, but it was something I happened to have read about and threw a random fact out about it. The other person was surprised, and commented on me seeming to know something about everything.
In thinking about it after the fact, I had one of those recollections of childhood that hadn't been thought about in years, and how it's pretty much shaped my desire to read everything. In junior high school, for reasons now completely forgotten, a class I was in wound up doing some trivia thing, and the class was divided into boys versus girls. The last question came down to me, and if I answered it right we'd win; the question was something to the effect of "Who was Laguardia airport named after?". I was 11, and had no idea, which means we wound up losing and I bore the brunt of the guys' wrath for not knowing the answer.
On some subconscious level, I think I decided that day that I'd never be put in that spot again.