Stupiditude

I believe I've mentioned before that I often thought of myself as a really intelligent retarded person. This was particularly true when I was in school. I often found myself unable to understand anything that was going on in my classes. Of course, now I realize it was simply because I wasn't paying attention to what the instructor was saying and when I read the books I usually was thinking about where I'd go if I had enough money to travel around the world.

My travel interest inspired me to think about how great it would be if I could become a photo journalist for National Geographic. I have never really read National Geographic, but I've often looked at the pictures. I like pictures. Especially the pretty ones. Pretty pictures make me happy.

I have no idea why, with this kind of mind that sometimes seems so limited, I have always had an attitude when it comes to my perceptions of other peoples' intelligence. I am immediatly annoyed by those I perceive to be below my intellectual level. Yet deep inside I know that my intellectual level is not so high. I constantly meet people who are probably smarter than me but I seem unable to believe it because often very smart people are not very polished in physical presentation, nor in verbiage. Though I have to point out here that I tend to think of "smart" people as those who are skilled in math and the sciences as I have no idea what the hell those people are talking about most of the time and so they seem like they have brains that work better than mine. At the same time I find them to be socially inept and look down on them anyway.

Then there's also this testing problem I seem to have developed around eleventh grade - you know - when standardized tests actually seem to matter. I had always done pretty well on them and then boom - I was statistically retarded. Was I simply psyching myself out? Did I have a brain aneurysm in my sleep which killed a bunch of my smart cells? Am I an idiot for thinking that an aneurysm could have done that? Do I want to do the research involved to find out? Is my increasing laziness a symptom of my decreasing perspicacity? Am I being pretentious when I use words like 'perspicacity'? Does that word even exist? Do you think I'm even interested in finding out? Maybe. I like words. I'm not always sure how to use them but I like to try.

I've always liked words and sentences and how things sound and look. I assume that there is some kind of nearly useless intelligence there but sadly we live in a world that values test scores and statistics. I find that to be very annoying and it forces me to concluded that we live in a world run by idiots - even if they are good at math and scored 1300 or more on their SATs.
What really pisses me off is that those bastards are getting all the high-paying jobs.