Originally Posted by Sethomas
You got me started and I didn't know how to stop.
Asila-
The question you invoke with your other question, "is Seth smart, and if so, how?" is a pretty annoying one for me. Even if I knew how to answer it, that would cause me to apply the same standards of "smartness" to other people. Even if I thought that could be done accurately, I wouldn't want to because then I'd be the douche I pretend to be.
Pretending IQ means something, and settling that it takes both nature and nurture for it to get really big, I might have had a pretty damn high one if my parents knew how to nurture it or wanted to. I have great parents, but they're not the type that would even want a high-ability child. But, they didn't, so I don't. I was just left with bizarre wiring that made me interested in smartly things but not really able to conquer them. In middle school I came to train myself to think in certain patterns and such to create a facade of smartness that would be very convincing, but it was always a facade. In high school I felt like I should finally get around to making a real life personality and round it out with actual skills and interests, but it was pretty late in the game for that.
The metamorphosis from the guy that people look at and think, "hey, he might know who Socrates was" into the guy who reads Socratic dialogues for shits and giggles was a pretty trying one that coincided with other defects in my wiring.
So, if I ever doubted in any recess of my heart that I was full of shit, living in Hyde Park surrounded by people who were smarter than I could ever fathom being was most humbling because they didn't act like it. I've lived through being given opera commentary by a man who's in history books dealing with the invention of the laser. I've wondered whether or not I should expose myself as a moron for admitting to having seen the Austin Powers movies only to hear a Dr. Evil impersonation moments later from someone who was sent to University of Cambridge on a Harvard scholarship (which he won with essays written in his second language) to round out his understanding of resonance imaging physics with a philosophical background. I had a crush on my RA who was cute, funny, had a great taste in punk music, and having started college at age 16 had earned her JD from Harvard when she was 22.
All this while I'd take mediocre levels of calculus and physics and still do poorly.
IN CONCLUSION: finding girls around here, a major state university town, who are smarter than me isn't really that hard to do. Four years ago I'd go to parties and make out with half a dozen girls and most of them probably had higher IQs, better math proficiency, and fewer gaps in their understanding of British history than I do. So, if you want to know why I REALLY suck at relationships, find any post by me in the Loveline forum dating back to 2000 (if ezboard for i-mockery still exists if you go further than 2003).
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