There’s another one of those “answer a bunch of questions” things floating around again, and I’ve recently received several copies. I don’t believe that the answers to most of the questions in this particular quiz are actually going to shed new light on my personality, but one of them caught my eye:
- “Do people think that you are smart?”
Perhaps it would be best to answer this question with a story about a hypothetical situation.
Let’s imagine that we are going to meet for the first time, and we’ve arranged to get together for dinner. Perhaps I am on a business trip, staying near your home, and you invite me to get together for dinner. For whatever reason (and there might be many) you invite me to pick you up at your house. Maybe you don’t drive, or maybe the idea of being environmentally responsible and only using one car appeals to you. The precise reasoning is not important. The essential fact is that I will be coming to your home.
I arrive slightly early, or perhaps exactly on time, but you aren’t ready yet. Something came up. You mean no disrespect by being late, but you’re not worried. We’re under no time pressure and I am not put off when you tell me that you’re not ready to go and will require a few more minutes to prepare yourself. I seem calm and unconcerned; nonchalant. If we arrive at the restaurant late, it will not be a problem. The restaurant will not be crowded and they will hold the table. I have no other obligations for the evening, and small, random acts of fate such as this do not annoy me.
You ask me to make myself at home in the living room while you go and finish whatever task you need to complete before we can go. You see me scanning through the books on the shelf behind your couch. You wonder whether I read the same books as you do, as you go off and finish whatever it is that you need to do. Maybe you are feeding the cat. Or moving the laundry from the washer to the drier. Or putting the finishing touches on an important memo for work. Or maybe you’re finishing your face. Or perhaps you are slipping a small dispenser of mace into your purse and making a quick call to your best friend, asking her to eat dinner tonight at the same restaurant so you have a get-away driver if I turn out to be a creep. It could be any one of a number of things, but the details, however interesting, are not salient.
When you are finished, we go out and have dinner. We have a light conversation. I nurse one drink all evening. I am amusing and passably witty, but seem to have disappointingly little familiarity with current trends, celebrities, as well as politics and recent world events. I am polite, but I answer questions about my family and upbringing with playful evasiveness that is subtle enough that it is hard to detect when I am being honest and when I am also being disingenuous. Eventually you conclude that my real life is not particularly interesting and I am trying to insinuate via my vague or ambiguous answers that it is much more interesting than it seems. My answers are always honest, but perhaps incomplete, or imprecise. Sometimes you guess that I am willfully misinterpreting your questions, but in such a way that my answers are more entertaining and illuminating than the answers you expected. For example, when you ask me “Why did you adopt children from China?” I will spend at least fifteen minutes talking about the myriad differences between the adoption programs of different countries and the manifold differences between the different adoption services and agencies that assist people going through the adoption process. At the end of my explanation you will have a complete taxonomy of the adoption options available and a process by which anyone interested in adoption can choose the most appropriate country from which they should adopt a child. By the time I finish talking, you will have forgotten that what you were really interested in asking was why I considered adoption in the first place. You have paid the price for asking the wrong question, and that price is having to listen to a facile speaker describe, with candor, humor, and insight, a topic about which you have little interest.
I mumble, and sometimes I don’t hear your questions or comments, particularly if the restaurant is crowded and noisy. If it becomes a constant issue, I might explain that I’ve suffered quite a bit of hearing loss over the years and have a hard time understanding what people are saying when there are a lot of distracting sounds, and that sometimes I mumble or speak too loudly because I don’t always know how loudly I am speaking. I will avoid mentioning this if I can get away with it, but if you look very puzzled by some of my answers I will assume that it is because I didn’t understand your question and responded to something I only imagined you’d asked.
At the end of the evening, I drop you off at your house and drive away. You do not invite me in. There isn’t even any question in your mind about whether this is an option. I am married, as I have mentioned many times during the evening, and am not physically attractive. You feel some doubt that whether meeting me in person was really a great idea–in your imagination, I was much better looking and more scintillating than I turned out to be in real life. You also imagined that I would be a snappier dresser, but you chalk this up to the fact that you imagined that I would be shorter and thinner. People who shop at Big and Tall shops don’t have the same fashion choices as people who buy off the rack and Abercrombie and Fitch. You are willing to cut me some slack here.
The next morning, you notice something unexpected in your living room. Over the years, from strange relatives, coworkers, and well-meaning but poorly-advised friends, you have collected a small pile of brain-teasers, puzzles, and things of that ilk. Tangles of chain or rope and twisted metal from which the goal is to remove a ring. Pieces of plastic or wood that have been carved or formed in strange shapes that allegedly combine in some unknown way to form a pyramid or a cube or polar bear or something. Things that came in boxes that said things like “10,000,000 wrong ways, but only one solution!” Things you took out of the box and played with for a few hours, or maybe a few days, and then put up on the shelf, unsolved, forgotten. When children come over to the house, you can distract them for a few minutes with these as games or toys, but generally they just catch dust on the bookshelf behind your couch.
Today six of them are catching more dust than usual, because they are arranged in a neat line spanning your coffee table. Each of the puzzles on the coffee table has been solved. There are more puzzles on the shelf behind the couch, but they appear to be untouched. You notice that the untouched puzzles are the “easy” puzzles. The solved puzzles on the coffee table are the really hard ones, including a few that you’d given up for impossible.
How did this happen? Who put them there? You couldn’t think of anyone else besides me who could have arranged them like that. But how? How long had I been there? You run through your memory. I couldn’t have been alone in the living room for more than fifteen minutes, and there are six solved puzzles. One hundred and fifty seconds per puzzle, and these are the puzzles that nobody you know has been able to make any headway on. Just putting the pieces together, even with the answer in hand, would take most of that time.
You look again at the puzzles on the shelf. They’re not exactly where they were. The puzzle that your niece managed to take apart but couldn’t put back together again is whole once more. The pyramid composed of plastic pieces now has a green piece on top, even though you are certain that when you solved it, the piece on top was red.
You revise your estimates. The six on the coffee table aren’t the only six I solved. They’re simply the ones I was still working on when you yelled from the other room that you were ready. They were the six I didn’t have time to put away.
Now, if you’re still reading this, and believe that it might be even somewhat accurate, then the answer to the question is that at least you think I’m pretty smart.
Less hypothetically, the people who pay me think I’m sufficiently smart, and the people who love me don’t care all that much, and as for the rest of you, well, it probably doesn’t really matter.
