Tuesday, May 14, 2013

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 y
ears 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 geniu
s on four separate occasions in the first draft of this postwhich is weird because I only used the word twicemy 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.