Newsflash: Intelligence is not perceived by everyone to be a desirable trait.
Today I realized just how much of a geek I am.
It's not my hobbies or my interests that define me so fundamentally as a geek, as I probably would've told you yesterday. In fact, yesterday I might have suggested to you that I'm nearer the side of what we'll call "passing" as far as geeks go. I would've been wrong, but I would've said it nevertheless.
No, what classifies me irretrievably as a geek is that I live in a world where people value intelligence. It's valued equally in women and men. While we geeks might have varied responses to ignorance, usually it takes very little coaxing for us to discern the difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is a temporary condition, and therefore forgivable. We all start out ignorant! As my father used to say, however, "There is no cure for stupidity." On any day, I'd tell you that about the only thing in my world perceived with more disdain than stupidity is feigned stupidity. Why would anybody do that?
This morning I blundered like a bull in a china shop into a political conversation about last night's Vice Presidential debate. Boy, did I misjudge my audience! In less than 120 seconds, I charged into some social mistakes which ended up being very educational for me. My story is full of those -- it's a series of scenes that I refer to as the continuing "ABC After School Special" of my life. Chalk this one up to life lesson.
Nevermind the actual conversation; it wasn't actually that interesting in itself. What does interest me is the conclusion I reached because of it: There are whole groups of people in this country, whole sub-cultures of them, that perceive being smart as a bad thing! It's not a quality anybody should flaunt, but that goes double for women!
Maybe you're reading that and wondering why I put it in bold. Maybe you knew this. Maybe to you, this "newsflash" is like I just told you that it's a day ending in Y. This, however, has entirely blown my mind. It... it never occurred to me. Ever. Not once. Not even a little. Sure, I've seen that at play in fiction. I've seen fictitious street gangs in L.A. behave that way on television -- drug dealers, children with guns... you know, people who don't live in the "real world" where I live. Crazy people! Violent criminals -- scum. It never dawned on me that real people, normal people could or would ever act that way...
But they do.
Ian thinks that this isn't just a "sub-culture" of rednecks, or whomever I blame it on. He thinks this is the norm in America, and it's our sub-culture - geeks - that are the exception to the rule. Could he be right?
I held that political discussion this morning with a coworker who's college educated, and whom I think is quite smart. She plays dumb a lot. Often. She runs into the first obstacle in her path, and it's like the response of a deer in the headlights. She "turns on the ditz," as I call it. This drives me crazy about her! And I've told her so in friendship. She's smart! She's educated! She should never let anybody make her think that she's dumb because she most certainly isn't! For the past year, I've chalked this up to her personal insecurity, maybe somebody in her childhood lead her to believe that she wasn't smart. In less than two minutes this morning, my whole view changed -- my view of her, my view of my own world, of "the" world. Now I realize - or suspect - that this is no personal insecurity on her part. This is how things work in her world. It's of no advantage to be considered smart, particularly for a woman. On the contrary, it's somehow perceived as quite the detriment. Ian suggests that this is social camouflage in that world, like a leopard's spots. It makes sense. When my coworker is trying to get something out of someone, she turns on the ditz. I always wondered why. Perhaps it's because she perceives a display of intelligence as aggressive, and she wishes to appear to be as non-threatening as possible. Intelligence is threatening.
Unrelated to this incident, I've been pondering this week another recurrent theme in the ABC After School Special of my life. People often comment that I "have an answer for everything," or at least that I an opinion on everything. They say it like it's a bad thing! I've never understood that, not even a little bit. What's wrong with having opinions? Inserting them, or asserting them is one thing, and maybe these detractors confuse the style in which I communicate my opinions with having opinions in the first place. That's no doubt part of it -- but... no. I've received this comment from enough sources in my days that I've come to realize that it's genuinely that I have something to say at all which causes offense to some. I've never gotten it -- and maybe today I got a clue! Opinions are held by the intellectual, if not the intelligent. "You think too much," Ian said with a smile at dinner, tongue-in-cheek, and from my sweetie who's got an intellect the size of a small planet, he hardly meant it other than sarcastically or would ever suggest such a thing seriously! Thinking's not such a good thing, seems to be a perception out there.
That's insane.
There are rare moments in life when you can look beyond the plastic tree and castle in the goldfish bowl in which you live and notice those thick glass walls around you. Those are the moments when you see pieces of the code that runs the Matrix. I think I had one of those moments today. I got a look out of my fishbowl... I can't tell if I'm looking into another one, or at the world at large on the other side of the glass. I just know one thing about it: It's scary out there. I don't like it. I'm much happier in here, with the geeky goldfish who value intelligence, who value intellectualism, and who manage to swim round and round the same damn plastic castle and keep coming up with witty, quirky references to it, metaphors about it, art in praise or condemnation of it, and despite the anti-intellectual detractors, we just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming....
I'm proud to be a geek... in fact, I'm thankful.
Trace
It's not my hobbies or my interests that define me so fundamentally as a geek, as I probably would've told you yesterday. In fact, yesterday I might have suggested to you that I'm nearer the side of what we'll call "passing" as far as geeks go. I would've been wrong, but I would've said it nevertheless.
No, what classifies me irretrievably as a geek is that I live in a world where people value intelligence. It's valued equally in women and men. While we geeks might have varied responses to ignorance, usually it takes very little coaxing for us to discern the difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is a temporary condition, and therefore forgivable. We all start out ignorant! As my father used to say, however, "There is no cure for stupidity." On any day, I'd tell you that about the only thing in my world perceived with more disdain than stupidity is feigned stupidity. Why would anybody do that?
This morning I blundered like a bull in a china shop into a political conversation about last night's Vice Presidential debate. Boy, did I misjudge my audience! In less than 120 seconds, I charged into some social mistakes which ended up being very educational for me. My story is full of those -- it's a series of scenes that I refer to as the continuing "ABC After School Special" of my life. Chalk this one up to life lesson.
Nevermind the actual conversation; it wasn't actually that interesting in itself. What does interest me is the conclusion I reached because of it: There are whole groups of people in this country, whole sub-cultures of them, that perceive being smart as a bad thing! It's not a quality anybody should flaunt, but that goes double for women!
Maybe you're reading that and wondering why I put it in bold. Maybe you knew this. Maybe to you, this "newsflash" is like I just told you that it's a day ending in Y. This, however, has entirely blown my mind. It... it never occurred to me. Ever. Not once. Not even a little. Sure, I've seen that at play in fiction. I've seen fictitious street gangs in L.A. behave that way on television -- drug dealers, children with guns... you know, people who don't live in the "real world" where I live. Crazy people! Violent criminals -- scum. It never dawned on me that real people, normal people could or would ever act that way...
But they do.
Ian thinks that this isn't just a "sub-culture" of rednecks, or whomever I blame it on. He thinks this is the norm in America, and it's our sub-culture - geeks - that are the exception to the rule. Could he be right?
I held that political discussion this morning with a coworker who's college educated, and whom I think is quite smart. She plays dumb a lot. Often. She runs into the first obstacle in her path, and it's like the response of a deer in the headlights. She "turns on the ditz," as I call it. This drives me crazy about her! And I've told her so in friendship. She's smart! She's educated! She should never let anybody make her think that she's dumb because she most certainly isn't! For the past year, I've chalked this up to her personal insecurity, maybe somebody in her childhood lead her to believe that she wasn't smart. In less than two minutes this morning, my whole view changed -- my view of her, my view of my own world, of "the" world. Now I realize - or suspect - that this is no personal insecurity on her part. This is how things work in her world. It's of no advantage to be considered smart, particularly for a woman. On the contrary, it's somehow perceived as quite the detriment. Ian suggests that this is social camouflage in that world, like a leopard's spots. It makes sense. When my coworker is trying to get something out of someone, she turns on the ditz. I always wondered why. Perhaps it's because she perceives a display of intelligence as aggressive, and she wishes to appear to be as non-threatening as possible. Intelligence is threatening.
Unrelated to this incident, I've been pondering this week another recurrent theme in the ABC After School Special of my life. People often comment that I "have an answer for everything," or at least that I an opinion on everything. They say it like it's a bad thing! I've never understood that, not even a little bit. What's wrong with having opinions? Inserting them, or asserting them is one thing, and maybe these detractors confuse the style in which I communicate my opinions with having opinions in the first place. That's no doubt part of it -- but... no. I've received this comment from enough sources in my days that I've come to realize that it's genuinely that I have something to say at all which causes offense to some. I've never gotten it -- and maybe today I got a clue! Opinions are held by the intellectual, if not the intelligent. "You think too much," Ian said with a smile at dinner, tongue-in-cheek, and from my sweetie who's got an intellect the size of a small planet, he hardly meant it other than sarcastically or would ever suggest such a thing seriously! Thinking's not such a good thing, seems to be a perception out there.
That's insane.
There are rare moments in life when you can look beyond the plastic tree and castle in the goldfish bowl in which you live and notice those thick glass walls around you. Those are the moments when you see pieces of the code that runs the Matrix. I think I had one of those moments today. I got a look out of my fishbowl... I can't tell if I'm looking into another one, or at the world at large on the other side of the glass. I just know one thing about it: It's scary out there. I don't like it. I'm much happier in here, with the geeky goldfish who value intelligence, who value intellectualism, and who manage to swim round and round the same damn plastic castle and keep coming up with witty, quirky references to it, metaphors about it, art in praise or condemnation of it, and despite the anti-intellectual detractors, we just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, swimming....
I'm proud to be a geek... in fact, I'm thankful.
Trace