Being Bright in a Dim World

In the fourth or fifth grade, a classmate brought it to the teacher’s attention that the product of 9×1 through 9×10 results in a number with digits that add up to 9. The teacher was so amazed that she spent several minutes explaining the phenomenon to us, praising the student who discovered it. I don’t recall exactly when I noticed the pattern myself, but I believe it was the first time I saw a times table that went up to 9. This was the first time I realized, “hey, I might be smarter than my teacher.”

I was a very well-behaved young boy, accepting teacher authority without question. My (first) run-in with illogical feminism was in 5th grade, when the teacher insisted that girls and boys are 100% equal – including equal performance in athletics. We were “forced” to integrate our lunchtime games, something we had been doing since preschool without being told. In the midst of this foray into gender equality, the teacher set up several special rules that only applied to the girls to give them an advantage.

Instead of having to get a member of the opposing team out to come back into the dodgeball-esque game, girls were allowed back in after 2 minutes of getting knocked out. Of course, we ignored their presence until the very end of the game – no use in taking out someone who will walk back in at will. The last portion of the game was a massacre: smash all the girls within 2 minutes before they start respawning.

My sophomore English teacher never gave me a grade above C- on an essay. I don’t remember caring, being in the throes of teenage depression. I brought a couple of these essays to my junior-year teacher when I started getting A’s again without any change in my writing style, and she didn’t agree with the previous teacher’s assessment. Sweet internal vindication. If I were 5 years younger with overbearing parents pressuring me to be valedictorian, that would have been a clear lawsuit.

I try not to use being smart as a premise due to it being alienating, self-aggrandizing, and other big words like that. While not the most troublesome burden to bear, I blame my frequent failures to relate to others, general anxiety, and information-overloaded inability to take quick, decisive action on over-thinking. It would be incisive to ask, “If you’re so smart, why don’t you do something about it?” Ehhhhh.

The outrageous hypocrisy of claiming total gender equality while instituting gendered rules struck me so deeply that I continue to bring it up 15 years later. At the time, only a couple of my close friends even realized what was going on. Nobody else managed to connect the dots.

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Despite having an office job, the front side of the building I work in is attached to a real, live factory, with blue-collar workers and all. I run into a few of them in the gym after work. I overhear a woman talking about how she, her husband, both her parents, and her 4 children all have birthdays on the 17th (of different months). Another woman turns to me and asks, “Have you ever heard of anything like that?”

No, of course I haven’t. Random events with odds like that occur every day, but they aren’t usually shoved into my face. I laugh and say, “No… you would have been better off just winning the lottery, though.” Do I flex my math skills and possibly teach someone something they may find interesting, but also might find completely meaningless or even insulting? Does she know, or care to know, that the odds of this occurring are 30.4 (days in the month) ^ 8 (members in family) – equaling a 1 in 729,438,478,308 chance. It’s not a phenomenon among 8 members of a huge, extended family – this is her blood above and below and, coincidentally, her husband.

Years ago an acquaintance was visiting a roommate at his Mongolian BBQ restaurant and asked, “Do you know how many possible combinations there are?” The roommate came home and told me, utterly amazed, and I was a dismissive ass of a comp sci geek and said “yeah, it’s like binary.” There are 30 items, each can be either on (in the bowl) or off (not in the bowl). The number of combinations is 2^30. My roommate, the engineer, found this utterly fascinating, and proceeded to put it in his marketing material – “Over 1 billion combinations!” He didn’t attribute math to an act of God.

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Previously on the night of the 17th-family encounter, work was rather slow and a couple coworkers were sharing “crazy” stories from the past. Example: “I got a flat tire while driving on the freeway. I got off and ended up on the back side of some industrial complex. I had never changed a tire before, and some security guard came up and asked if I was alright. I explained the situation and he guided me through the process without actively helping.” The storyteller’s conclusion? “It must have been an angel, because there was nobody else around.” Yeah, because rarely would you find a security guard in an industrial area that otherwise looks abandoned and would be a prime target for taggers and other random crime were it not for the patrol of… a security guard.

Now if he were a practicing Catholic and claimed the guard was a divine response to his prayers to the patron saint of automotive trouble, that would be one thing. But an angel?

I bit my lip, got back to work, and decided to hold on to my stories for a later date. I have a few a bit more intense than “I got a flat and everything worked out.” I could cobble together an argument that I am a magnet for unusual events, considering I have had a loaded shotgun pointed at my face on more than one occasion. Without this conversation from earlier in the night, I would have jumped at the chance to explain elementary probability. After hearing a flat tire story attributed to God, I questioned if this woman could believe a 1 in 729 billion chance to be anything but the divine at work.

—

Considering the amount of time I spend at home, alone; reading, writing, and researching nonsense – I tend to think of my life as rather boring. At least, that’s how I imagine it appears from the outside. While driving home from bars a few weeks ago, a buddy pointed out the interesting timeline of my adult life. I’ve gone through a number of distinct phases since I turned 18 and have experienced a wide swath of what human life has to offer. The bad stuff, at least. It was an eye-opener to look at my life from the point of view of a friend. If he doesn’t realize how utterly boring my life is, then nobody else has to either. This knowledge will come in handy when meeting new people.

No, I don’t sit at home and write about how cool I am on Saturday nights. Police stick shotguns in my face while meth addicts claim I’m a ninja and road raged white trash ask, “YOU WANNA TANGLE?!?”