Pinky's Book Link

Saturday, November 23, 2019

I’m Not Smart and I Can Prove it.



Recently, I bravely uploaded my raw genetic data into a website that can tell you what predispositions you have towards dreadful diseases, personality quirks and whether asparagus makes your wee smell funny or not.

Daunting much?

Naturally, it turns out that I harbour particular genes which predispose me to the usual horrible afflictions like, ALL the types of cancer (including prostate), coronary heart disease and colour-blindness,… but happily, I also possess some of the ‘protective’ genes, so fingers crossed they balance each other out.

Unfortunately, though, there was some more important and devastating news in the report.

Apparently, I am in possession of an average intelligence.

I KNOW. I was stunned.

How could this be when I've often suspected I was a bit of a genius?

The first thing I did when I read it was ring my mother.

“Mother dear," I croaked piteously into the phone. "Do you remember how you yelled at me when I ashamedly brought my grade five report card home and I came eleventh out of a class of thirty? Well it turns out you’re a child abuser. It wasn’t because I was lazy and mucked around in class, it was because I have average cognitive ability. IT WAS’NT MY FAULT! I have the intelligence of a ringworm!”

She didn’t react because she can’t hear me on the phone due to an inheritable, age associated propensity to hearing loss.

I told my father face to face. He just kept nodding and smiling at me as if I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. Mind you, he’s deaf as well.

I won’t say I haven’t struggled adjusting to this new and unpleasant level of self-awareness.

Now, when the television ads for the Bachelorette come on the telly, I have to pull myself up short. I can no longer scream out, “What frickin moronic imbecile would lower their IQ and watch this drivelly tripe?” because the scientific evidence shows that I’m the exact kind of imbecile the programme is aimed at.

When I read the inane comments in the ‘Text the Editor’ section of the local newspaper, instead of casting a scathing eye over the rubbish they write and sitting back in superior disgust, I now feel an affinity with the idiots. They’re my people. My tribe.

I’ve come to understand why it is that I have done, and continue to do, silly, silly things.

I’m just not that clever.

I tried to reason that perhaps in my case, nurture has outweighed nature and that even though I wasn’t gifted great cognitive prowess at birth, I may have developed higher order thinking through my upbringing and education.

But then I realise that in the last five years I’ve never been able to fully complete a Courier Mail crossword, or learn to conjugate simple French verbs or understand gravitational time dilation even when Scotto spent three hours trying to explain it to me after we watched the movie Interstellar.

The report did reveal that I possess a significantly higher capacity for memory but even a parrot can reel things off so that’s not really indicative of intelligence, is it.

It also said that I have larger than normal cranium area which could be a sign of enhanced brainpower. Of course, it could also be a sign of a hollow space with nothing to fill it.

In short, the whole revelation has been quite liberating. Whenever anyone tells me, “Surely you can do better than that, Pinky?” I can reply, “Well, actually I can’t… and I can prove it.”

I must add the website was free so if you have any raw data hanging around and you want to find out if you’re a mediocre human too, feel free to message me for the link.

And my wee does smell funny after eating asparagus in case you were wondering.