why does the blowfish glow? (warning-dickensian childhood interlude)

I am smart.

Oooh, that feels so much better! So freeing! I'm OUT!!! Group hug!

The temptation to add '...I mean, I'm no super genius' or something similarly tempering to the bald assertion 'I am smart' was almost overwhelming. And that reaction right there, my darlings, am what this post be all aboot.

Funny subject. First of all, I feel under under enormous pressure right now to spell everything correctly. And to use proper sentence structure, perfect English and flawless punctuation. And most importantly of all, to try and not swear. Smart people do not use foul language. Ever.

HA! OH, SO IS MY HUMOR LAUGH I AM BEING! HA HA!

Second of all, how many of you reading this already have the oh lordy fidgets? Me too. And why is that??? It's not like its a disgusting disease, for the love of fuck. It's a good thing. Might it have something to do with vulnerability? You do tend to leave yourself open to a lot of snarky judegments and comments when you make an assertion like 'I am smart', don't you? Nevertheless, the fact remains. I am. Have you ever seen me on the Jerry Springer Show? No you have not.

I rest my case.


The social fact remains, though, that college educated people don't want to hear from anyone without a degree. It makes them itch. Folks who barely made a high school equivalency don't want to hear from anyone with a degree. It pisses them off. Yet both squirm and roll their eyes if anything other than pop culture subjects come up in conversation. Quick! Hurry! Make a joke and defuse the thing before it blows!!!!!

Now where and when I came from, It Wasn't Very Nice to be smart and have tits at the same time. I mean it was genuinely considered rude. If you were male, well, then you'd go to electronics classes at the voc tech and everyone was well rid of your boring shit; that was almost ok. But to be female? Fo-git it. You did not use big words, you did not read non-fiction (unless it was a cookbook or maybe Coronet magazine) and you certainly didn't watch adult programming on public television. Education stopped abruptly at 12 grade and a good thing too. If you worked, you left it at work and on Sunday you went to church to regain your rep as a nice lady. Oh my yes. Just because it was the 60's doesn't mean it was the 60's everywhere, or that anyone was paying much attention.

Now that was as much an issue of financial class as anything else. Still, even a well-educated nice lady ( read: probably from a wealthy family) knew about certain things only as a means of adorning her conversation, not because she actually liked the subjects in question.

So what happens when you DO?

Being a smart girl meant one thing and only one thing when I was growing up-it meant that I was a lesbian. My mother 'knew' it, my teachers 'knew' it, one high school teacher thought she'd take advantage of what she thought she 'knew', all the female friends I had and eventually lost 'knew' it, and every guy I failed to screw 'knew' it (but lets face it; who hasn't heard that one, right, ladies?)

But see, thats fine until you realize how many dumbass lesbians there are. (Grabby, too.)


I was passed by my teachers all throughout Jr. High and High school without even having to do the work in some instances, because ( as I now realize) it was pretty obvious from my demeanor that there were Problems At Home. They wanted me to stay in school and graduate so I'd have a better chance of going to college, which was nice of them, in retrospect. Not that I greeted this favor with anything but snarling teenage contempt, but I did graduate, by the skin of my teeth. And I continued to recieve sterling reports from all my instructors with words like 'promise' and 'talent' and 'gifted' and 'college' in them. Which mattered not one bit and was so much wasted paper and ink.

Now, I had been told early on in very specific terms by my parents that I would not be getting a college education because 'it would only give me big ideas that would just hurt me later.' Sound like the Ozarks? Nope. Milwaukie, Oregon. People would ask my parents what college I was planning on attending and mom and dad would laugh and laugh! Oh no, she's not going to college. That'd be a waste of money for a pretty girl like you, wouldn't it, sweetheart? Ha ha! As though they were insinuating that some lucky, lucky guy would have married me long before then! ( a whole 'nother bag of false assumptions there) but cutting me glances just to let me know that I wasn't to think that's what was meant for a moment.

And quite frankly going to college never really entered my head, not seriously. The way I had it planned I was going to move out the minute I was 18 and go to India. The honest truth of the matter is, had I received a higher education at that time in my life I would have taken great pains to waste it completely. Very true. But not on marriage; oh hell no, I wasn't even thinking about marriage. I knew nobody was going to want to marry me ( yet another bitter little appendix full of pus there) I was going to waste my life on drugs and cosmic enlightenment in some far-off exotic locale.

I recall the eye-rolling, smirking reaction my mother had when she discovered me checking out 'Walden' from the library. Yeah, I was 11. She made an issue of catching the librarians eye and giving her a 'oh humor the little faker, shes just showing off' smirk. Odd, coming from the woman responsible for teaching me to read at a first grade level by the time I was four.

Really odd.

As I look back I remember more instances of her shooting me little comments like 'don't go getting big ideas about your life' and 'don't go trying to copy your cousins; they're boys' and shit like that. My fathers' perennial admonishments had to do with how I'd better not even think about getting too big for my britches and how I better not act all sassy like I was growing out of the top of my hat. I mean, eighteen solid years of this shit. Daily.

Really quite odd indeed.

Was this some sort of slavery training? You know, I honestly think it was. These were people who hated their lives and told me in all sincerety that life was not good and was never meant to be good so I better not expect to much from it. I resent it like hell to this very day, as if that weren't already squirmingly obvious.

So I have no degree, and I have no future plans of getting a degree. Although I do have most of a degree in Business. Irregardless of which I like (and own and make) modern art, I prefer movies with robots and explosions, have been known to date girls, and I -deep breath, sit down- use big words. (And I can leg press 230 lbs. Plus, if I wanted to I could write this in Reverse Spanish. Or calligraphy. Or fluent UbbyDubby. See, now I'm showing off. And you are impressed by my having mastered the secret language of the ZoomKids.) Yet I ride a Harley, married a man, am a member of the working class, and occasionally visit the buffet at Harrahs' casino. And say 'fuck' a fuck of a lot. Oh no! she cried. Maybe I have been kidding myself all this time! Smart people don't ride Harleys and they melt like hot polystyrene at the merest whiff of Ranch dressing. And they are lesbians. Like Condoleeza Rice and Stephen Hawking.

Particularly Stephen Hawking.

Anyway I like what I like, and if I want to read about Roman trade routes or forensic entymology then I damn well will. I am happy. All I want to know is why I have this sick compulsion to collect ugly table lamps.