I slid my hands palms-down under the outside of my thighs and began to swing my legs.\u00a0 My heels thumped against the horizontal wooden bar of the chair.\u00a0 The new “media center”—we still called it the library—at Cove Creek Elementary was air-conditioned.\u00a0 Goosebumps sprung out on my arms, and I suddenly had to pee.<\/p>\n
The man seated across from me was dressed in pleated khakis, a short-sleeved plaid button-down, and hiking boots.\u00a0 He had a wide brown mustache, and he was a little bald in front.\u00a0 On the table in front of him was a booklet, a record sheet, and a perfectly-sharp #2 pencil.<\/p>\n
“What is air made of?” he asked.<\/p>\n
I bit my lower lip.\u00a0 Without letting it go, I said, “I don’t know.”\u00a0 He put a zero on the ledger in front of him.<\/p>\n
“If Sally leaves her house at 7:45 and gets to school at 8:10, how much time has she spent traveling?”\u00a0 My brother was teaching me to tell time, but I hadn’t quite mastered it.\u00a0 It seemed so easy when he did it, but then again, he was in second grade and knew everything.\u00a0 I studied the floppy drive of the brand-new Apple computer to my right.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know,” I told the\u00a0 man.\u00a0\u00a0 He drew a perfect zero right underneath the first one.<\/p>\n
“If Jeff puts 8 eggs in each of 3 baskets, how many eggs are in all the baskets together?”\u00a0 That seemed like it should be easy.\u00a0 The green cursor of the Apple blinked against a black background.\u00a0 It seemed to be counting all the seconds that I didn’t know the answer.<\/p>\n
“I don’t know,” I said to the man.<\/p>\n
My brother, the second-grade genius, and my sister, who had skipped second grade entirely and was now in fifth grade, were already in GT.\u00a0 Their gifted-and-talentedness was not under scrutiny.\u00a0 But now it was my turn.\u00a0 My mom had gone to my teacher, Miss Kathy (for in the South in 1981, you still called unmarried teachers by their first names), and asked her when I would be evaluated for GT.\u00a0 Miss Kathy, who had had both my siblings for first grade, had said, “Oh, Rebecca, you know Amy’s your social butterfly.\u00a0 She’s not like Bruce or Laura.”\u00a0 My mom was fuming but calmly requested that I be tested anyway.<\/p>\n
So here I was, watching an eternal column of zeros stretch down the page across from me.\u00a0 That’s when I realized:\u00a0 I was stupid.\u00a0 From that point, any academic endeavor that was remotely challenging was proof.\u00a0 Writing papers took everything I had; tests were terribly stressful.\u00a0 Moreover, I did all kinds of extracurricular activities to compensate for my lack of intellect.\u00a0 I was drum major in the band; I got in the 12-person competition theater troupe; I became president of the AFS club; I studied in Italy for a year and Mexico for a semester; I sold the hell out of some books door-to-door.<\/p>\n
What I distinguished about eight years ago was that I was accepting the opinion of a six-year-old.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 I mean, if some six-year-old came up to me now and said, \u201cYou\u2019re stupid\u201d, I wouldn\u2019t think a thing of it.\u00a0 Anyhow, it took a while, but I let that shit go.<\/p>\n
Of course, occasionally, when I’m feeling six, when I don’t get an allusion my friends make, when I say something inappropriate, it crops up again.\u00a0 But I’m always able to identify it as my own bullshit and let it go.<\/p>\n
My question is:\u00a0 Why can’t I do that with my other bullshit?<\/p>\n
P.S.\u00a0 I got into that damn GT program.\u00a0 As Homer would say, I’m S-M-R-T.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I slid my hands palms-down under the outside of my thighs and began to swing my legs.\u00a0 My heels thumped against the horizontal wooden bar of the chair.\u00a0 The new “media center”—we still called it the library—at Cove Creek Elementary was air-conditioned.\u00a0 Goosebumps sprung out on my arms, and I suddenly had to pee. The … Continue reading Dumb da dum dumb<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4665,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79\/revisions\/4665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avidbruxist.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}