CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Trying to Be Smart is Better Than Not Trying at All

Sunday, November 19, 2006

this entry brought to you by radiohead, "kid a"


I once had a friend named Samantha-- actually, she was the girl in the naked juice bar entry. Shortly after it was obvious we were becoming friends, she told me that I seemed really smart, and she warned me that I might not like her because she was learning disabled. Most of her classes were remedial her whole life, and she told me that sometimes people that she met were too smart would often stop being her friend after a couple of months.

Actually, I'd noticed it before she'd mentioned it. God bless her, but she wasn't very bright. But what I liked about her, and the reason why I remained patient with her, was because I could tell she was trying. She could carry very deep, thoughtful conversations, provided you were patient with her and knew that after you were done talking, she'd take this enormous pause to get her thoughts straight and she would carefully choose her words. Her part of the conversation always took at least twice as long as my part, and if you were talking about any kind of complex idea, she would get confused and ask you to go back and explain yourself. This was especially true when it came to jokes; in general, comedy bored the hell out of her. She had a very low interest in The Simpsons, for example, but when she tried to watch with me she would get hopelessly lost and ask me why I was laughing.

I was telling a friend about Samantha recently, and this friend said she couldn't understand how I could be a friend with someone so frustrating. And I'll admit, she was an extremely frustrating person, and had a habit of burning through friends quickly (for the record, she was an emotional wreck, which was probably a bigger reason why she didn't have many friends for very long, but I can't imagine her slowness not being a contributing factor in most of her failed relationships). But the reason I put up with her was she tried. What is frustrating about dumb people-- and when I say dumb, I don't include Samantha in that category-- is that they don't try. You attempt to engage them in any kind of conversation beyond whatever boring bullshit they're into, and their eyes just gloss over, they shrug, and they say "I unno," and they go back to their pitiful little lives. They live these terrible, insular lives, and hang out with other people who are also terribly boring and have no opinions about anything, have no real concrete desires, and don't pay attention to anything.

Samantha, on the other hand, was not stupid, but she had a bad habit of saying that she was, and not in an unserious way, but an "I hate myself because I am slow" kind of way, and I would tell her this. She wanted to keep up in conversation, instead of just losing interest and doing something else. She wanted to learn new things, even if the concepts made no sense to her initially. I told her, Samantha, you are smart. A smart person comes across something that makes no sense, then attempts to figure it out-- they find joy in the sense of discovery. This is exactly how she was. Concepts would befuddle her, but she wanted to figure them out and get past them rather than around them, and if it took her longer than it would perhaps you or I, at least she would do it.

Frankly, I wish everybody were like Samantha. I wish more people tried to challenge themselves intellectually at every chance that they could get instead of having a "whatever" attitude and being stuck in an intellectual ghetto like way, way too much of the population.
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with love from CRS @ 11:18 PM 

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