There’s some sticking points that I have in my thesis project. I’m not sure what to do about them; but I’m going to write here about the thing that you’re not supposed to talk about, which is that I mention my IQ tests in part of my thesis and I’m not sure how to go into it.
When I was a child, my mother was hell-bent on getting everything that she could out of the American myth of meritocracy–through and for her children. There’s something lovely and honorable about that, how a mother could love her kids so much that she actually went above and beyond in order to find new opportunities for us, things that we wouldn’t be able to afford but that our talent, whatever it might be, could win us.
She spent a little bit of money on getting us IQ tests in order to get us into expensive private schools on scholarship. It was something that never worked out–there wasn’t space in the classrooms that we were accepted to, which goes to show that these schools didn’t really want to have intelligent kids in their classrooms–they wanted students who could pay.
On the internet, there are a lot of posts about “former gifted children”: who went into gifted and talented programs and ended up burning out. The thing is, I don’t think that too many of them were actually gifted and talented–I think they were upper middle class and white. Because I honestly have the test results to prove it, and I never actually felt like one of those former gifted children–that thinking spark in me keeps ticking and thinking, and even after working I ended up going back to school and just doing my thing. The minute I stopped working I started looking for more places to think and consider and find the way things worked out. I didn’t do perfectly in college, but not because I burned out and was unable to handle the work–because I had already been burned out by high school and living with my crazy family. I was on a spiral of trying to deal with psychiatric drugs and all the other issues that had weighed me down.
But it’s a stumbling block in my thesis that either gets overlooked when I write it, or where people start poking holes and criticizing it. And I think it’s because there’s something dangerous, wrong, and scary to admitting that you’re a brainy type of person.
I remember when I was taking one of the IQ tests with the tester. The room was carpeted and soft and neurtal, warm and comforting and not too big, with a computer in one corner and a bunch of books in another. I was being bribed with a beanie baby, so I kept on asking the tester if I got the answer write, because I badly wanted another stuffed plush animal. Onetests involved test ing logic and sequential thinking through piecing together the stories. I remember that we got stuck on one point with a boy and some animals in a boat–the boy was taking animals back and forth from an island like that logical puzzle where there are a bunch of animals which will eat each other if they’ve been left alone for a while. I can’t remember, but what I do remember is getting into an argument with the tester over it, because I tried to argue that the story tiles themselves were completely arbitrary. Which one comes first? I said that there was a story which flowed in-between the pictures, and which could be anything; that anyone could make up their own story about what came in between the pictures. I wonder what the old test papers say now. I wodner if I got docked points for that. I do remember getting a beanie baby after that, though.
I wonder what the tester thought about the adroit-ass kid that refused to take care of the story. I think it’s why I’m so into counter-narratives. I want things to be different.
I think there’s something in being the type of person that I am which is threatening. It threatens the order, because I pull out different ideas; because I challenge them; because I keep going down that train of thought. I think it also threatens individuals, because we’re worried that someone cunning is going to outsmart us, take us away from things that we want. Cut in front of us. Because of that myth of meritocracy. Who wants to think that they’re staring in the face of a person who wants to get in front of them in line? But meritocracy is an illusion, so the reality of the situation is that I’m going to lose my place to someone less exceptional. I’m used to not getting what I want.
Why are people afraid of the intelligent? Why are people afraid of the sharp? At least they are in this culture; you see the faces of so many white Americans which crease into angry scowls with age, because they’re people who get angry when they can’t understand something. Sometimes I think about how this country breeds richness and ignorance, with its terrible school system and the ideas of individual excellence/supreme individualism and entitlement that get promoted here in every fucking one of our lessons. It’s in the way that we talk. That things are done by individuals, not in aggregate. Not the way that each of us is processing our own universal.
Why can’t you just let me be? Talk to me on my level? Be less intimidated?
I’m going to keep chewing on it, keep processing it. It’s not there yet.
Why are people so shitty and insecure when it comes to talking about intelligence and genius?
I guess we have to do something if we have genius–find new ways of thinking–I think if we do more processing, that’s better. The way I think about it is this: some thi9ngs I’m better at processing, better at getting a deeper understanding–things like language which I don’t pick up very quickly, but which I explore, feel, understand deeply. And for me that’s really the best feeling in the world, the things that makes me feel great: that sense where you’re exploring ideas, picking your way through and argument, knowing that you don’t know everything and figuring out where your research needs to take you.
And the other thing is, the way I think about it, is that nobody comes up with stuff on their own–we all take and process what we get, macerating it and extracting knowledge from it. That’s our lived experiences, that’s the way we pull things into something greater–if we were a little more open to talking about processing, to talking about knowledge and information and explroiing things when it gets hard–maybe we could come to the better conclusions faster.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re all executing the same program on slightly different hardware. Every fucking thing on this living planet, executing the same program–survive, eat, keep your stomach full so that you can get enough space to reproduce and maybe, just maybe, find a little time to think about the meaning of it all. A hawk, with its bright keen eyes, wheels in the sun off the California Coast and looks for pigeons while a grackle mocks the seagulls with a raspy cry, mocking their flight patterns before begging for potato chips from tourists. So do stands of feral calla lillies, reaching towards the sun, ignored by strolling people looking over the play and pattern of the water and all the seafoam that gets kicked up where the tide hits the shore. A plover running in-between the waves, trying to eat and not get swept away–a plodding tourist with flat feet–we are all trying to get somewhere, to understand more, to process the information and keep ourselves from being too hungry.
If we could be a little less anti-intellectual, maybe we’d get further, get further with our thinkiong and our being and really appreciate the plenty that we’ve managed to achieve. And yet we let our society fall to shambles…we push people to extract their labor and not their contributions to our body of knowledge…we make it hard to talk about things that we can hang on to, the things that we’re not supposed to talk about.
I don’t know where I’m going with this…but this is a page for secrets, so okay.