Now, it's easy enough for a person to assume I'm not smart. In the aforementioned legal deposition, I was obliged to disclose my entire collegiate and employment history. Neither of the above would convince anyone that I was smart. I went to three colleges of no renown and got a degree from none of them. For 6 years, I worked a string of slacker jobs, most of which were unskilled labor and paid peanuts. How, then, could I objectively prove that I'm smarter than the average bear? My own conviction that I was smart came from anecdotal evidence and the fact that I totally fucking OWNED at standardized testing when I was in public school.
In elementary school, I had to take an IQ test. My score was 136. All I knew was that 140 was "Genius" and I had fallen four points short. At the time I was sure it was a mistake. I convinced myself that the four point shortfall was just because I was hungry and distracted. Unfortunately, subsequent IQ tests through my school career kept proving the same thing: 136. This was maddening. I wanted to be a Genius! I wanted to be able to say "why should you listen to me? Because I'm a fucking GENIUS, that's why!" But, instead, I had to live with the chagrin of being not-quite-a-genius. It was not until later that I realized that 136 still put me in the top 1%.
And so, in a huff after being treated like brainless Jane by some fancy schmancy Harvard lawyer, I decided that I would join Mensa. For those who don't know, Mensa is a club for people who test in the top 2% of the population. I told some friends I was going to try to get into Mensa and the responses ranged from "hmm. Maybe I should try that" to me basically getting laughed at for five solid minutes.
I called my Mom and asked if she happened to still have any of my old test results. Since she didn't, I figured I could just take the Mensa test. It honestly never occurred to me that I would NOT pass the test. I mean, I had a historical precedent of OWNING at standardized tests! I once applied for a job at Cheesecake Factory and they made me take an intelligence test. The guy interviewing me seemed almost unnerved as he told me "you've got the highest score I've ever seen." Then he didn't give me the job, which, in retrospect, makes sense because clever ducks in lowly positions can figure out really fast how to circumvent the rules and steal shit.
And so, I paid my 40 bucks and scheduled the test time. In an interesting twist, the mensa person in charge of test scheduling ACTUALLY KNEW WHO I WAS. This was trippy in the fact that not that many people know who I am, and the fact that this was a mensa person, so I had that feeling of "AHA...see? See? I'm totally in with the smarties already!"
Taking the test was a learning experience. Firstly, On the day of the test, I was wickedly hungover. This taught me a lot about my "live in the moment" mentality: that while I was funning it up the night before, I wasn't thinking "I should refrain from drinking so that I don't have to take a test hungover." I was just funning it up, tomorrow-be-damned. Still, I dragged myself to the testing room and prepared to kick ass, even in my sluggish state.
I looked around the room and the first interesting thing I noticed is that I was the only girl there. Mensa, is, judging from that room, a total sausage-fest. (I told my laughing friend this and she said "it's because they've all got small dicks.") Second, I started looking over the test, which lead me to totally ignore the test administrator. This is the main thing I learned about my self: I am terrible at listening to verbal instructions. I always have been a little bit, but my years of self employment have definitely cemented it. So, for some reason, I thought she said that "wrong answers don't count" which would lead to the logic that you should answer every question whether you know it or not.
And so the test began and the learning continued. Thing learned: I own at verbal skills and suck at math. I should have known this based on my performance on the ACT, in which my lameoid math and science scores dragged down my awesome verbal and reading comprehension score and gave me a barely-get-a-scholarship-at-state-college 26. Still, since I hadn't taken a standardized test in so long, it all felt fresh and new. It's not that I couldn't do the math questions, it's just that I had to WORK REALLY HARD at it.
When I was doing the math problems, my brain felt like some creaky Rube Goldberg device which took way too long to come to it's conclusions. I was lucky if I could finish half of the problems before the time was up. Meanwhile, with the verbal sections, my brain suddenly turned into a kung-fu master doing a backflip and kicking ten ninjas in the face before landing. I'd zoom through effortlessly and finish way before the time was up, then sit there tapping my pencil for ten minutes. I was like "please! more verbal! Give me definitions! Give me comprehension! Give me analogies! I am to analogies as superman is to leaping tall buildings!"
The test sections seemed to be these alternations between things I was good at (verbal skills, sequences) and things I sucked at (anything with numbers...except sequences!) And so I was ping-ponging between thinking that I had the test in the bag and I was totally going to blow it.
Anyhow, I finished the test and turned it in, and, as I was doing so, one of the guys turning in his test said to the administrator "If you only get counted for right answers and you only answer one question and it's right, don't you get 100%?" And that's when I realized... you DO get counted off for wrong answers! Which means that all the last-minute fill-ins I did were going to completely fuck me! I left with the sinking knowledge that I had totally muffed the test.
Sure enough, I got the letter later on saying that my score did not qualify me for mensa. But here's what I learned about myself:
1. I am a drunken hedonist.
2. I am a loose cannon and play by my own rules (ie. I am bad at paying attention to verbal directions).
3. My mental alacrity sways strongly toward words and pictures rather than numbers, which makes me realize that "superior intelligence" can be compartmentalized into specific areas. In a room full of mathematicians, I'd probably come off like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel.
I suppose I could have retaken the test and seen if I could have passed if I followed the instructions, but I didn't really want to pay another 40 bucks. Besides, what if I WERE in mensa? It's not like I could tell mister fancylawyerpants "Excuse me, I'm not dumb...I'M IN MENSA!" since this would not only make me sound like the douchiest douche in douchetown, but also the nerdiest nerd in nerdtown. So, really, was it all just some hollow exercise in self-reassurance? Did I just need to KNOW that I was smart? Didn't I already know that I was smart? Is "smart" even something that can be objectively evaluated? Isn't it just a matter of how many questions on a test skew toward your strengths?
I realize now that all of this is beside the point. The real moral of the story is that that lawyer is a patronizing dick and needs to get punched in the nuts.