Get Your Goon On

greatn posted:

When it comes to being social, it is rather common that people will not socialize with a higher intelligence person. There's mental bullying and peer pressure to ostracize such folk all throughout high school and before.

I know first hand. I'm decently attractive(you can judge for yourself), and bathe every morning, yet in high school it was always the same, it didn't matter. The only people who would socialize with me were other nerds, other high IQ people or sometimes outcasts of a different variety. And it seemed women in thsoe groups were slim pickens.

I tried socializing with cool kids, with athletes. They would have none of it, no matter how nice I smelled. Maybe my manner of dress had something to do with it, I don't know.

But it was always the same. Every day of high school they would point and jeer. Whisper about me when they thought I wasn't looking. And then when one of them got enough courage or was finally double dog dared to, they would come up to me.

"Hey Paul, you're smart, right?"

I knew it was a trick question, yet I always answered. "Yeah... I guess I'm pretty smart. What's up?"

And then they asked. "Well, if you're so smart, can you see why kids love the taste of Cinnamon Toast Crunch?"

I'd answer the only thing that in my mind could be right. "It's ingredients are well balanced and it comes in a conveient square shape, with bite sized pieces." What other answer could there be? Well, I was wrong apparently.

They'd proceed to punch me in the stomach and push me down, then start kicking me. "You mother fucking moron." They'd say. "There's cinnamon swirls on every bite!" I'd start to hear as I passed out.

Every single day.

I was talking with one of my friends earlier about a pretty challenging physics problem we worked on separately the previous day and she was telling me about how she worked on it for a while and still couldn't figure it out. I then told her "Yeah I don't blame you because even I couldn't figure it out!"

She then replied with "What are you trying to say?" and realized what I just said. I don't even remember how I replied. How do you reply to that?

One of my colleagues (I'm a college professor) is the chair of the CIS department at our college. In both her syllabus and in-class lectures, the professor in question refers to USB drives as "memory sticks" without fail. Even her syllabus says that students need a "Memory stick, any brand."

Guh.