Regular Life

My senior year in college, my highly anticipated GRE results arrived. Their percentages and bar graphs suggested that I learn to say, “Do you want fries with that?” in several languages. On the literature section (my field), I was in a very select group I came to call The Bottom Four Percent.

For those not counting, that means that 96% of those tested scored higher than I did. I was crushed for two reasons. First, I had never done so badly on a test. Second, I had taken it in preparation for applying to graduate schools, and this would not impress any of them.

Given a written passage with asolutely no context, we were asked to identify the author and discern between literary periods. A lot.

(Setting: The University’s student center. My Mood: Melancholy)
American Literature professor Conrad Shumaker: In your English courses, did you read any of the works on the supplemental reading lists?
Me: Not really.
Shumaker: We encourage students who are going to pursue a Master’s to read those works, too.
Me: You think a slow-ass reader like me, who barely and sometimes never got through all the required reading was going to heap more upon himself?
What I Actually Said: Oh.

I probably should have paid more attention to the various syllabi’s supplemental reading lists and less attention to my social life (i.e., pursuing young ladies). I ended up ditching that whole Master’s in English idea. By my senior year, being an English professor appealed to me very little, anyway. Reading for enjoyment was my bag, not deconstructing every inferred underlying meaning and then telling undergrads to regurgitate it on paper.

That was great. In one paragraph, I justified the only academic failure in my life. Well, the only one for which I’m responsible. The other is a very long, painful story involving The Evil Lynn and a team of attorneys. I wonder if I still have that old answering machine tape…

Nah, for now, let’s just go back and look at “gifted” programs for a moment.

There was a test. I took it, and subsequently was placed in my high school’s Gifted and Talented program. They didn’t tell me whether I was in because of my left brain or my right, and to this day I’d like to know.

At another, much larger high school I attended, I took a similar test. One question featured an empty oval outlined in black, on a blank page I was instructed to modify in any way I wanted. I like turtles, so on my first impulse I added body parts and a geometric pattern to make the oval look like a tortoise.

Suspecting that my turtle was neither creative nor interesting, and knowing for certain that I had no drawing skills, I erased it. I drew a pattern to make the oval resemble a fingerprint, then drew a crude dialogue balloon coming from off the page and added the text, “Hey, chief, I think we got a lead on this print.”

I didn’t get in, but I don’t know if the turtle/fingerprint page had anything to do with it.

Being a smarty of any kind won’t get you very far in a capitalist society if you don’t know how to work and interact with the general population. On second thought, I know one borderline sociopath who does it fairly well, in large part by hardly ever showing up at the office.

Overreacting Reader: You’re saying all kids in gifted programs are sociopathic geniuses?
Me: No. Now cut that out, Giftie.

Coming soon… my parents’ reunion (after interest from readers)

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