Stuck on Stupid

Being smart is not politically correct in America. That’s right. Most people, especially writers I’ve noticed, seem to find it abhorrent to deem themselves smart or talented or gifted. And we all know how certain political parties malign our President for being a liberal intellectual.

I have read articles in which the writer says something so profound it brings me to tears. And in the very next sentence, the writer disavows any credit for having had the intelligence to come up with something so profound, so it must have been some kind of accident or unconscious act of plagiarism.

That’s not my modus operandi. In fact, I have spent a significant portion of my life knowing that I was smarter than the average chick and – wait… for… it – WISHING I WERE MORE STUPID. Actually, that alone might be evidence that I am not as smart as I think I am, isn’t it?

Anyway, I was made aware of my outsized IQ at the age of 4. Unbeknownst to me, my family had noticed that I was exhibiting signs of being precocious (read: smartass), so they conned a family friend who was an educational psychologist to administer stealth IQ tests. If they thought they were fooling me with those Rorschach pictures…

So it was determined that I had stood in the brainiac line a little too long when the creator was passing out smarts. All of a sudden there was talk of part-time jobs and selling insurance policies in order to pay the tuition for the University of Chicago Laboratory School! What the hell? I hadn’t even graduated from the boring and baby-blathering nursery school and already they’re planning to put me in college?

As fate would have it, all of them were working as many jobs as they could handle, so I was forced (thank goodness) to attend kindergarten with the great-unwashed average IQed kiddies at the public school that “colored children” attended. Oh, don’t for a minute delude yourselves into believing that my personal paint-job didn’t have a lot to do with all the fuss about my intellectual abilities.

Of course, once I managed to survive the exposure to normal boys and girls without becoming suddenly slow, my mother added another meatless meal to the weekly menu in order to afford the tuition to our Catholic school, where I was guaranteed to receive a “decent education.”

That all went well. In fact, it went so well, it caused me to have to deal with one of the more humiliating events of my pre-adolescent life.

At the end of my 8th grade year, Sister Sarah Williams announced that Proviso Township High School was conducting an educational experiment. Thirty eighth-graders from the feeder schools in the township area would be selected on the basis of their Intelligence Quotients and academic achievement to date to go through high school together, in special accelerated classes. They would become known as the Plus 30.

Now, it just so happens that I was at that point engaged in a battle royal with my parents, who were hell-bent on me winning a scholarship to Nazareth Academy, the local Catholic high school FOR GIRLS! I wasn’t having it. Nope. No boys? No Lezlie.

Besides, I wanted to go to the public high school and stop being such a conspicuous outsider. Here I was, different in every possible way from the group of people with which I was identified, and teen-aged angst was setting in. Everybody hated me already because I was “mixed” and went to the snobby Catholic school. And there had been rumors at the public elementary school that my white mother thought I was too good to mingle with the likes of them because she wouldn’t allow me to attend their weekly Wednesday night dances.

Being the smarty-pants that I was, I recognized an opportunity when I saw it. But the Plus 30? Surely, I would not be one of them out of all the kids in all the schools in the area. And who would want to be one of them? Talk about a way to get permanently ostracized in the community in which I had to try to live!

But it was my only hope of avoiding banishment to the testosterone barren Nazareth Academy and at least there were boys at Proviso High, so I changed my approach. Instead of trying to hide my intellectual “light” under the proverbial bushel basket, I let it shine at every opportunity. Instead of throwing the spelling bee, as I sometimes would, just to keep the haters at bay, I tried my best to win them all. Extra credit homework became required in my mind, not optional. I sneaked into the school office, where I was sometimes doing teacher’s pet duty by entering student grades into their permanent records, and I did the unthinkable. I looked at my own records and saw, for the first time, the magic number that was my IQ.

Oh boy. It was worse than I thought. With this score, there was very little chance I would MISS being selected for the Plus 30.

Well, it happened and because it did, I was successful in convincing my parents that I would be getting an even better education at Proviso High, and I sweetened the deal by signing a contract which guaranteed I would maintain high grades or suffer the consequences.

And that‘s when the fun began.

Apparently, while I wasn’t looking my personal value system was taking form. That system kind of puts in order of importance the things that make a person tick, so to speak. In later years, using company administered inventories and tests, it would be determined that my top two personal values are power and achievement, followed closely by recognition. The word power, in this context, was defined as the ability to get things done by influencing other people to act. Achievement and recognition are self-explanatory.

Combine those values with my undeniable interest in boys and their attention, and I became the embodiment of that representational character known as Harriet High School. Class officer? Why not? Student Council? Of course. First non-white drum majorette in the history of the school? Yep. Anything and everything to distract my haters from the fact that my name was on the wall outside the superintendent’s office on the dreaded Honor Roll. Once, I even went into the office to ask that they remove my name in order to quiet the ever-increasing vocal disdain of my peers.

Fortunately, the tables turned when I got to college. Oh, I still did my over-achievement thing and personified Claudia College, but there it was encouraged. And, since at the time I was the only non-white female student on campus, the anti-achievement pressure from the African-American students ended.

I have often thought that life would be so much easier to bear if I were just less smart. I wouldn’t be so intimidating to so many men. I wouldn’t over-think everything to the point of analysis paralysis. I wouldn’t be so quick to pick up the clues left by my two cheating husbands. And maybe I wouldn’t even know what I don’t know.