I thought the street name was ‘a hug.’

I bought a plastic doodad today at Urban Behaviour or Urban People or Urban Planet or Urban Outfitters or something (Q: did I miss the memo where every store in West Ed now has to be prefaced with ‘Urban’?) with 28 sleeves to display photos. I crammed it with postcards instead, though most of my favourites were unfortunately too big to fit.

Anyway, while I was digging around for postcards I found my old Genetics 301 textbook! I say textbook. Technically it was one of those custom courseware thingies, weighing about as much as the equivalent volume of depleted uranium. Genetics 301, it seems, is heavy stuff.

The cover reads “GENET 301: Organization of Simple Genomes. Dr. D. Pilgrim & Dr. F. Nargang. Fall term 2000.” Here is a sample sentence from the third paper in: “Sheared nuclear DNA from S. cerevisiae of average fragment length 6 to 15 kilobases was linked by means of poly(dA-dT) tails to a mixture of DNAs of pJDB36, pJDB41, pJDB45, and pJDB71 which had been converted to linear molecules by digestion with Pst1 endonuclease.”

Just typing that made me say “Ow!” Yet nine years ago I not only understood it, but received an 8 in the course. It was a language I spoke back then, apparently. Not quite fluently, perhaps, but I sure wasn’t sitting there going “How does endonuclease nomenclature go again?” I should remember the derivation of Pst1. They weren’t doing complex genetic modifications in this paper, just making yeasty yeasty chimeras; I should know the composition of all four of those plasmids, they were useful lab standards. How far we’ve fallen…

I joke with people that seven years of postsecondary education has made me dumber every year, and I still feel that it’s true, but I’m going to say it flat out: I used to feel more intelligent.

Now, intelligence. Let us discuss intelligence – intelligently, if we can. Or if we cannot, let us discuss perceptions of intelligence.

Flipping through that coursepack made me feel like an Australopithecine trying to figure out an iPhone. I was going through the papers – all extensively annotated, highlighted, and doodled on by a hand that seemed very foreign from mine – actually saying “Duhhh?” and laughing at myself. Was I really more intelligent when I was in that honours genetics degree? I wasn’t intelligent enough to get into grad school, yo. I applied to an ‘easier’ field after that godawful year working at the cancer/hepatitis labs – environmental science. It felt like a breath of fresh air – as if the struggle to fake intelligence for four years had been like holding my breath. But I felt strange for years telling people that I switched from molecular genetics to environment. Now I gloss over my first degree so it blends more seamlessly, jives more closely, with the second: “My first one? Uh, biological sciences.” Because I don’t want to feel stupid again. To tell myself, “You left genetics because you weren’t smart enough.” I KNOW. The constant reminders aren’t necessary, you so-called brain. SHUT IT.

I never wondered about the source of that feeling, that shame. My parents have consistently placed more emphasis on intelligence than character; actually, character itself is seen as a theoretical concept, a Disneyfied thing, something you have to put into kids’ movies to keep them entertained before they go into the ‘real world.’ This real world, in their view, is where intelligence counts for everything and unfailingly brings eternal happiness and, more importantly, prestige. Where intelligence is seen as possessing infinitely more worth than things like kindness, compassion, or intuition. And well, OK, maybe kindness doesn’t, in fact, pay the bills – but it still has worth. Which they don’t believe, and which I grew up also not believing. Close friends will have noticed my predilection to spout something ‘clever’ at the expense of people’s feelings, and I’m sorry, I’ve noticed that too, it sucks and I’m trying to fix it. I grew up thinking that it was better to be a smart person than to be a good person.

So I’m dumb now. That’s not in question; I’m clearly dumb now, having abandoned the metaphorical conference room where intelligent people hang out and heading instead for the metaphorical playground of surmountable challenges. Goodbye, basic research; hello, chasing engineers with a soil probe. Goodbye to the life of the mind. Hello peace and bliss; goodbye waking up to bad dreams about punching endless circles out of tobacco leaves the better to inoculate the raw edges with Agrobacterium. Goodbye, goodbye.

So why do I feel so unutterably shitty about it?

Clearly things are better now, in the land of the dumb. Aren’t they?

Last November I vented to an old friend in e-mail: “The more I think and write about my life, the smaller it seems to become. The poorer I seem to be, the lonelier, the stupider. Not that I ever lived a life of glitzy adventure but once I remember living a life of potential, at least. I suppose being branded as ‘gifted’ early on must have really fucked me up more than I gave it credit for – somehow, I got the idea that I could do anything because I had **A GIFT**!! not that anyone told me what it was. (It obviously wasn’t intelligence, or I would have guessed by now.)
If only I’d never gotten that label, if only I could have grown up or gotten older without that particular falsehood hanging over my head. I mean, look at my day. The gifted child grows up and does this with a day she will never get back: up at 5:15, oatmeal for breakfast, corduroys and a turtleneck. To the train in the dark, soil sampling with frozen fingers, forgetting keys, recovering keys, yelling at engineers. Invoices, cups of tea, water elevations, home in the dark, Outkast at her ears. A makeshift supper. Spongebob, CGI rats, slipping in the shower. Sitting vacantly in front of a laptop with six missing keys. Which isn’t to say that I or even my peers are all parasailing with celebrities or should be or should want to be, but we were all given one life, nonrefundable and nonrepeatable, and this is what I’m doing with mine?! I almost can’t believe it. Why aren’t people FREAKING OUT about this? Why aren’t we all in a constant state of panic? Please tell me I’m not the only one who’s given this any thought, or I will just die in my sleep. ON PURPOSE.”

Y’see that there? Did you catch that? That no longer being ‘gifted’ is causing me angst? That I’m ashamed of the life I live now, because less intelligence is involved? That I’m seriously freaking out and have been for years, ever since I graduated with that damn honours degree and promptly set about wasting it, that I can’t seem to stop freaking out because there seems to be no good reason to do so?

Y’all, this is not a good state of affairs; and if it continues, soon I’ll be too stupid to even ponder it further. Only the hatred and shame and frustration will linger, and it will be much worse for my inability to remember the reasons behind those feelings. I miss genetics. I miss feeling intelligent.

Anyway, though, the plastic thingy with its cargo of faraway cities looks fucking awesome. My friends have the greatest taste in postcards (Paris, Berlin, RuPaul). That display is definitely the highlight of the condo now.

I know these are boring. They make me happy to post though.

From another ‘Mistress Death,’ covering the family history and – in a half-dozen frames – the cosmogony of Death’s little world.