I’m Average…and You Can Be Too!

I often get compliments on my intelligence. Many of my friends assume that I am incredibly smart, because I know that the gestation period of an elephant is 2 years, that standard anthrax isn’t as dangerous as man-made streams, and that the arsenic in your apple juice probably won’t kill you.

Here’s the thing people; I’m not that smart. If I had to track myself on a scale, I would put me at average, to minimally above average. But people get the wrong impression, and attribute genius abilities to me because I know how to research and code.

Wanna hear a secret about coding? It’s not that hard. In fact, it’s nothing more than adding and subtracting in series of 10s. I don’t know any average intelligence person who will get the question ‘what’s 20 + 10?’ and have to Google the answer.

You know what makes people think I’m smart? My sarcasm and clever quips. When it comes to sarcasm and clever quips, I’m fucking Einstein. I assume this ability comes from a higher than average sense of humor quotient, coupled with a complete lack of any kind of moral filter, inborn cynicism, and significant quantities of alcohol and mind altering medications.

It is indeed, delightful to be me.

But no, I am not that smart. I can’t look at an algorithm and know the answer immediately. I can’t hear a composition played on a piano and copy it. Hell, I can’t even do that Rain Man shit where I count the number of toothpicks on the ground.

Only one thing separates me from the masses, and that is my ability and desire, to ask questions. And when I ask those questions, I know how to get answers from the right people. Let me explain.

A long, long time ago, I met my first boyfriend. After a day of riding around on one of those bicycles with a giant wheel, and pulling each others powdered wigs off, we started to get hot and heavy. As he desperately rounded third base, I stopped him. He resisted.

“I have blue balls. Did you know those can cause cancer?”

Indeed, I did not. This of course, is pure bullshit. However, here is where most teen girls make their mistake. They either give in to the idiot entirely, believing his factual medical advice, or they ask one of their idiot girlfriends. Of course, their idiotic girlfriends always knows a girl, who knew a guy, who said his cousin’s sister’s husband had that happen to them.

But I was born a cynic who knows how to ask questions and who has no shame in approaching anyone to get those question answered. So when Mr. Blue Balls told that to me, I didn’t go to my best friend for verification.

I went to my best friend’s dad, because he was a doctor and he would have some actual, factual knowledge on that shit.

When he finished laughing his ass off, he explained to me that this was an age old excuse, used since men started walking upright, to get laid.

And I had my answer.

Look people, I’m not that smart. I just know how to pull up a browser and cipher the fake from the real. It’s kind of like how you tell a set of fake tits from a set of real tits. After a while of looking, you just know.

I do something unique. I form my own opinions. When I hear a news story, due to my inborn cynicism, I know that it is impossible for anyone to report news purely based on the facts. They all have their own slant.

So I ignore their slant, I take in the facts, and I let them swirl around in my head a little bit before I make a determination.

I don’t assume something is true because someone tells me it is.
I don’t assume that something gives you cancer because some TV doctor tells you it does
I don’t assume period…I evaluate.

What makes me so smart isn’t some kind of inborn intelligence. It is my ability to ask questions in the first place. I don’t see some news story about how latex causes cervical cancer and throw out all my condoms and stop fucking

Instead, I ask three questions;

Is this fact too ridiculous to be reasonable?
Does the person sharing the fact have any reason to be biased, one way or the other?
How knowledgeable is the source?

This is actually a pretty easy method to learn. Watch as I break it down using the Mr. Blue Balls story.

“Blue balls give you cancer.” The fact is too ridiculous to be reasonable. If this happened regularly, it would be all over the news, with newscasters urging all women to start giving blow jobs to strangers.
Mr. Blue Balls was 100% biased. No way around that one.
Mr. Blue Balls was a 19 year old boy with no medical training. In no way at all did he qualify as a ‘knowledgeable individual”.

This tells me that the opinion of Mr. Blue Balls was not a valid opinion.

That isn’t intelligence. It’s just logical reasoning.

You too, can be average like me. You can make logic based decisions relative to the evidence you’ve seen. You don’t need to accept anything at face value just because someone tells you it’s true. You can make your own determinations. That doesn’t make you a genius; that just makes you an average person who refuses to have their opinions spoon fed to them.

And that is nothing to be ashamed of.