Over the last several months, I've undergone The Change.
No, not menopause, you assholes, I'm not THAT old.
I have embraced...The Nerdy.
Don't get me wrong...I've always been a nerd. But I have worked at cultivating a careful balance between the Nerdy and the Relatively Cool. In high school, I was the smartest girl in my class (hate that I have to add that "girl" qualifier, but it is what it is - our valedictorian and salutatorian were both boys, while I was #3, i.e., "none of the above")...I was in the orchestra, and drama...but I was also captain of the dance team. I wore spandex and shook my pom-poms while doing the splits on the football field with the best of 'em.
I am often fond of telling students, "look, I realize that getting a Ph.D. in chemistry puts me a few rungs up the Nerd Ladder. But there are those who choose to climb higher than they have to...and those who spend their whole careers trying to dangle one toe to as low a rung as they can reach. I don't want to be either one of Those Guys."
But there are certain Nerdy things that I have to own up to.
Namely, I now listen to NPR.
Now, I'm sure you're thinking, "But Wahooty, you live in Canada. Surely you can't get NPR up there!" But on the Eighth Day, God created podcasts.
And it was good.
This is primarily thanks to my Monkey this summer - he gave me an mp3 player as a parting gift that has become an appendage, and is always loaded up with episodes of This American Life, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and Fresh Air. I am a bona fide addict. To be fair, the habit started before the Monkey, but he was the enabler, because my new mp3 player has more memory and, more importantly, a longer battery life.
If it weren't for NPR, I wouldn't know what naked shortselling is, or credit default swaps. And I wouldn't know how hard it is to write the ultimate breakup song, or how dangerous a little bit of knowledge is. And I never would have heard Paula Poundstone say, in regards to our current president, "Now that the dollar is worth so little, we could put him on it."
The nightly news, the Daily Show, and CNN.com don't spend an hour explaining to you how Wall Street got into its current mess. Meanwhile, whatever you might say about its liberal bias, NPR has spent several, and the blame is non-partisan. With credible experts. Frankly, we're all in some way responsible for fucking this country up.
So pardon me while I toss my virtual panties onto the NPR stage.
Ah, hell...here's my bra too. {toss}
I love it when people take the time to explain the most fucked-up things in a way that I can understand. And, while I might not be the most well-informed American...
I AM PRETTY FUCKIN' SMART.
If I ever get asked in a job interview, "What's your greatest strength?" I'll probably answer, "I wholeheartedly believe in my ability to learn anything. It may take me time, but there isn't anything for which I cannot cultivate a basic understanding." I don't care if it's cliche, I don't care if you've heard it a million times, my greatest strength as a person is my capacity for learning. I am eager, and I am motivated. All of my greatest passions can be boiled down to that one fundamental truth - acting? Check. Food and wine? Absolutely. Teaching? If I didn't believe in my own voracious hunger to absorb information, I would never be able to expect as much of my students.
And, as I have watched this presidential election unfold over the last couple of years, I have slowly arrived at one conclusion:
I am apparently part of this "intellectual elite" that Americans, as a whole, are supposed to fear.
I've never had a formal IQ test. I know my SAT scores, and I've taken a few of those online IQ tests that are supposed to give you a pretty good approximation of the results you can expect from a real one. I know enough to know that I would probably qualify for MENSA, albeit by the skin of my teeth.
No big deal - I could give a shit about joining MENSA. I think MENSA is bullshit - I have no desire to socialize with people solely on the basis of their IQ. Do you have any idea how BORING most people with high IQs are??? I would have found it insulting to my intelligence if I DIDN'T qualify for MENSA, quite frankly. But, according to their manifesto, qualifying for membership means you must be in the 98th percentile on one of their sanctioned IQ tests.
That means, if you buy into the whole IQ test thing, that I am quite possibly among the smartest 2% of the general population.
Even if you DON'T buy into the IQ test thing, and if you give the approximation tests a generous margin of error, I probably still fall into the top, oh, let's say 5%. Maybe 10% when I'm drunk.
And I am still FAR from the smartest person I know.
Okay, fine, I realize that I probably know more people with Ph.D.s/law degrees/medical degrees/whatever than the average person. So my perspective may be slightly skewed. However, that doesn't change the fact that I tend to assume that everyone in a given group that I am hanging out with is just as smart as me. I have friends that are fond of introducing me to people by saying, "This is my friend Beth - she's really smart, she has a Ph.D." Dude, whatever. Usually, while going through customs at the airport, I'm asked the usual questions of where do you live, what do you do, what is your bra size, etc. My standard reply is, "I work at the U of T, I'm a postdoctoral fellow (as my work permit says), I do research." I once got the response, "Oh, you have a Ph.D.? So that means I'm in the presence of great knowledge and wisdom." My response? "No, it just means you're in the presence of a Ph.D. - there's a BIG difference." I'm educated enough to be able to occasionally stump my dad for an answer, but not so much that I don't think that my parents/older brother are the smartest damned people I've ever run across in my life. When I hang out with my friends, I think they're all brilliant. Which is why I find it hard to believe that the rest of the world isn't as bright as the clever people I surround myself with.
Now, I'm sure you're thinking, "But Wahooty, you watch too much MTV to overestimate the intellect of the American people. You just watched Paris Hilton's My New BFF this very evening!" But this is exactly why I watch the MTV - because I am constantly befuddled that such people actually exist in reality. It's like going to the Zoo of Intellectually Challenged Individuals - I can't bring myself to admit that these people are a closer approximation of the Average American than I am. I'm much more content to feed the animals their tequila shots in their man-made habitats than to admit that they actually roam among us, buying Budweiser and Jell-O shots when left to their own devices.
As normal as I have always felt, objectively speaking, I have never been Average. I had straight A's all through grade school and high school. I went to UVA - it is an extremely competitive school, and I worked my Wahooty off to maintain the most rock-solid B-average you've ever seen. Seriously...no matter how hard I worked, the best I could achieve was...meh, barely above average.
I got only one B in grad school. But C's are rare in grad school, so again, I'm not the top of the class...just Above Average.
And when it comes to voting...God help me, I actually WANT to elect someone that is smarter than me. Because I do NOT feel like I am well-informed. I feel thoroughly unqualified to run one of the most powerful governments on earth, and would like to entrust that ability to someone with more insight and greater mental capacity than me. I'm sorry, but I want someone in charge who is articulate, and uses big words...correctly. Who doesn't sink to the lowest common denominator of human society...doesn't pander to those who don't know any better...AND WHO KNOWS HOW TO PRONOUNCE THE WORD "NUCLEAR" WITHOUT HAVING IT SPELLED PHONETICALLY ON A TELEPROMPTER. This is why I love our current election slate - we have a choice between TWO people, both of whom I feel are smarter than me, whether I agree with them or not. I can feel good about that - it is a refreshing change of pace. But there's good smart and bad smart - Nixon was scary muthafucka smart, and look where that got us. I don't think we have anything close to another Nixon on our hands, but there are some scary prospects in our future, on both sides of the ticket. I'm not a fortune teller, I can only go with what my gut and my heart tell me is right.
So vote early, and vote often. Vote Nerd in '08. And whichever way you go, have a drink with me on Nov. 4th, in celebration of Intellectual Elitism in practice.*
*And pray that whoever comes out on top survives his first term. Seriously. People frighten me.
