L_VE

I once friend-zoned a guy because his eyes pointed in slightly different directions. Otherwise, he was a perfectly viable candidate: college-educated, well-spoken, decent-looking. But his eyes veered just the tiniest bit away from each other. Like maybe they were having a fight, like one of them had borrowed the others car and didn't refill the tank or told a mildly racist joke at a work function.

Wow, I got an earful from my girlfriends about that one. To hear them talk, you'd think I should've been grateful he even had eyes.

So my unresolved, interpersonal dysfunctions aside, the current national divorce rate still averages in at a heartwarming 40-50%. Let that statistic sink in the next time you find yourself at dinner party or neighborhood picnic. Almost every other couple is just a handful of broken promises away from a total amourous implosion.

A shame really, when nowadays, it seems like the path to everlasting romance is relativity obstacle-free. Star-crossed lovers no longer have to fear being separated by plague, famine, or Hun invasion. But in the calamity of our modern lives, we've grown cynical and closed off to the idea of true love or soul mates. Have we manufactured these self-imposed deal breakers to protect us from contemporary threats like disappointment, emotional intimacy, and heart break?

But I'm taking a stand. Not a literal one, of course — I've had a lot of wine tonight — but a figurative acknowledgement that "happily-ever-after" does exist. Genuine, fairy tale, gooey, true romantic love is laying in wait, like my bookie when I'm late on a loan payment for its moment to strike. If it wasn't we wouldn't have had any reason to question if it was ever there as an alternative at all. 

"Some say that true love is a mirage; seek it anyway, for all else is surely desert." ~Robert Brault

Memorial YAY!

My Memorial Day Weekend Plans:

1. Organize closet

2. Clean apartment

3. Catch up on laundry

4. Read Cloud Atlas

5. Eat a full jar of Nutella 

That smarts

ge·nius noun \ˈjēn-yəs, ˈjē-nē-əs\
a : a single strongly marked capacity or aptitude
b : extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity
c : a person endowed with transcendent mental superiority;especially : a person with a very high IQ

Maybe it sounds strange, but growing up, having a genius dad never really seemed like that big a deal. 

I mean, I knew he had a PhD in atomic physics from the University of Connecticut. 

And that our deep thoughts differed in their respective complexity:
Me: "Whatcha thinking about Dad?"
Dad: "Quantum entanglement. Whatcha thinking about Deb?"
Me: "If Penny [our cat] would change the color of her fur if she could."

But it wasn't until I was older and stumbled across his thesis defense while cleaning out a closet—Inelastic Energy Loss and Charge State Measurements of Inner-shell Excitations in Xenon Ion-atom Collisions...yeah, that's what SHE said—that I began to realize, and appreciate, the man who'd set a standard of intelligence for me so high that for the first two years I lived in DC, I thought the law firm I worked for was actually a non-profit organization specializing in helping paranoid and homicidal lunatics suffering from delusions of grandeur.

And while personally, I may have misspelled the word genius on four separate occasions in the first draft of this post—which is weird because I only used the word twice—my top-shelf genetic stock does make me curious about how my own head smarts stack up. 

For a mere $18, Mensa's online test offers insight into your synaptic workings. So during a particularly slow day at work, I figured why not check it out? A decent IQ score might even make my parents proud enough to finally tell their friends that I work at a law firm and not as a grave robber. 

WARNING: Mensa's timed online timed test is...timed. Should you run short on time during this timed testing process, because you started the test, got distracted by something shiny, and forgot about it until you had two minutes left to complete it; stop and restart the test at a later time. Do not select all (C)s like they told you to do on the SATs. They lied to you, it does not work. 

Lack of mindfulness to the timing process may result in one or more of the following: 

• comically low test scores; 
• future mistrust of cognitive function; 
• uproarious laughter from friends and family; 
• shame-based hallucinations; and
• an erection lasting longer than 4 hours.