Thought Dump

I honestly believe that I lived in an era before “gifted kids” was a thing. But that’s likely because I wasn’t gifted.

undo wrote:How many of you were gifted kids?

I was one of these losers

in GATE (Gifted & Talented Education) after school classes in 4th grade, the teacher had us do a project on statistics one day. she brought in a scale and had each of us weight ourselves to create a dataset for calculating mean, median, etc.

as a fat kid, i pleaded with her not to do this. i said, Ms. Whatever-your-name is, please don't make me get on that scale and be the highest number in the group. she didn't seem to understand what could possibly be unnerving about standing on a scale and sharing your weight with your 4th grade peers.

a little story about "gifted" people.

I was a massive retard who only had to do half a day of primary school before being taken home and taught by specialist assistants because I kept getting into fights with everyone

chrondog wrote:in GATE (Gifted & Talented Education) after school classes in 4th grade, the teacher had us do a project on statistics one day. she brought in a scale and had each of us weight ourselves to create a dataset for calculating mean, median, etc.

as a fat kid, i pleaded with her not to do this. i said, Ms. Whatever-your-name is, please don't make me get on that scale and be the highest number in the group. she didn't seem to understand what could possibly be unnerving about standing on a scale and sharing your weight with your 4th grade peers.

a little story about "gifted" people.

Jesus.

Guess I'll raise my hand.

I could tell stories all day of how teachers laid traps for me to fall into and humiliate myself but upon reflection, all of my worst experiences in school were entirely of my own design.

I was labeled a gifted kid as far back as 1st grade and I remember everything coming so easy to me and just latching onto that label as a source of identity and self-worth with everything I had. So when it just felt like I ran into a wall in 5th grade and certainly again in middle school, suddenly struggling with shit for reasons I could not understand and could not cope with because I'd never had to really try when it came to anything school-related at all, it was nothing less than soul-crushing. I don't know if I ever really grew out of those feelings, which is weird AF to admit as an adult but everything keeps coming back to that for me.

So yeah I would never do this to my kid, there is zero upside to it I mean c'mon

undo wrote:I was labeled a gifted kid as far back as 1st grade and I remember everything coming so easy to me and just latching onto that label as a source of identity and self-worth with everything I had. So when it just felt like I ran into a wall in 5th grade

this was me except that my "wall" was college-level physics and multivariable calculus.

i've had to tear down the notion that my self-worth should be derived from intelligence that i did nothing to deserve ever since

So basically when I hear someone tell a story about how they (or anyone) was reading philosophy in middle school or even high school, I'm quick to distrust them, maybe even resent them, because any truth behind that, whether it's written off as a "phase" they went through or not, definitely discredits my own personal narrative about being a genuinely smart and precocious kid, which really chips away at the foundations of my self-worth.



Suffice to say, there were no kids like this^ around me growing up, and I'm sure the only reasonable response to that would be "well good" but that bothers me because I just feel like I might as well have grown up on Mars for all the shit I did not encounter during my adolescence that maybe could have shaped my worldview in a way that might have helped make everything seem more real and approachable and interactive rather than some abstract concept that might as well not even exist and just "out there" somewhere.

Yes I know Howard Zinn is a historian and not a philosopher but I'm just generalizing here about my sad fetishization of a certain kind of knowledge that I never had a glimpse of until obtaining it long after it apparently became some kind of an embarrassing cliche of a pursuit.

I grew up in an isolated place before the Internet and I wish I could say I just hated every minute of it but I really didn't know any better or had any idea that there was a bigger world outside of the one I was just born into that wired my brain to perceive of as certainly imperfect but definitely just and absolute.

It is my hope that I'll get to the bottom of what's really eating at me in writing these posts, please be patient with me until then.

Yes, I know nothing is stopping me now from reading any book I choose but that's not really the answer to what's bothering me.

People are both intelligent and unintelligent, as well as successful and unsuccessful, in different ways and at different times.  Bear that in mind.  You are who you are, regardless of what path you took to get there.  And you seem like a pretty motherfucking swell dude, from over here.

I was a math genius, I wrote books, and I regularly consumed "high art" music, literature, cinema, and so forth, when I was growing up.  At the University of Illinois, my name is literally engraved on a bronze plaque.  I've traveled the world and gotten it on, from time to time, with gorgeous women.

...But I'm still, by any objective measure, a spectacular failure.  I missed out on a bunch of great opportunities.  I mean, I lived in Tokyo for two years and never even went to the Modern Music record store!  I've wasted years consuming and analyzing art rather than improving and making the best of myself; and no matter what, I always look back and think, "Damn, I'm an idiot.  How was I not listening to/watching/reading X instead of Y?  I'm so stupid!"  So I'm neither a genius nor a fool nor a world-conquering bad-ass nor a waste of space.  I'm just me!  And, like always, I'm a whole bunch of different shades of a whole bunch of different colors from a whole bunch of different rainbows.  Such is life.

undo wrote:Yes I know Howard Zinn is a historian and not a philosopher but I'm just generalizing here about my sad fetishization of a certain kind of knowledge that I never had a glimpse of until obtaining it long after it apparently became some kind of an embarrassing cliche of a pursuit.

I grew up in an isolated place before the Internet and I wish I could say I just hated every minute of it but I really didn't know any better or had any idea that there was a bigger world outside of the one I was just born into that wired my brain to perceive of as certainly imperfect but definitely just and absolute.

they were making me read photocopied excerpts from A People's History in the 7th grade in Berkeley Public Schools, you would've loved it bro

that being said, grass is greener, etc. there's something to be said about that contrast between the world you knew and the world you grew into. the fact that i thought i knew just about everything by age 17 hasn't paid dividends in terms of objective measures (wealth, achieving goals, whatever).

zappo wrote:I've wasted years consuming and analyzing art rather than improving and making the best of myself.

hey-o!

Also worth noting that Camus wasn't reading Camus when he was a teenager, either. So you're in pretty good company.

I remember in college getting excited seeing a copy of Tricolor Trilogy Blue at a video rental place. I asked the dude I was with if we should get it, and he said "Man, I'm tired of that movie."

Some people get exposed to things without having to try.

zappo wrote:Also worth noting that Camus wasn't reading Camus when he was a teenager, either.

there's a great t-shirt idea here somewhere

chrondog wrote:

zappo wrote:Also worth noting that Camus wasn't reading Camus when he was a teenager, either.

there's a great t-shirt idea here somewhere

Pretty sure if he was writing anything in his teens, Camus was reading Camus, but I get what you're going for here.

Duff... wrote:I remember in college getting excited seeing a copy of Tricolor Trilogy Blue at a video rental place. I asked the dude I was with if we should get it, and he said "Man, I'm tired of that movie."

Some people get exposed to things without having to try.

Kieslowski? I also didn't see that until college, although I'd been wanting to see it since my sophomore year of high school. One of my teachers recommended the trilogy to me, but this was a while before torrents and shit. In fact, I didn't even have any internet access. And we were also kind of poor. Just wasn't any way to get a copy of it out in the far northwest suburbs of Chicago. DVDs finally happened, though, and then Netflix. Bam! Good things came to those who waited. I re-watched the trilogy in 2016. Holds up! And White was better with age.
"Problematic" in interesting and uncomfortable ways. Last summer, I rewatched the Dekalog. Also holds up, though I still found A Short Film About Love to be "problematic" in simply gross and ugly ways. Diff'rent strokes, I guess.

That's the one.

Lack of funds, lack of a car, lack of friends who would know what the fuck a Kieslowski was, kept me in the dark about a lot of cultural stuff pre-internet. For the few who paid me any attention, I was the guy who knew about these things. Didn't take long for me to realize I didn't know anything.

Man, all I cared about when I was a kid was sports and hating everybody for not loving me.

Guys, I'm very excited to see so many posts/thoughts in my thread!

Ned Braden wrote:Man, all I cared about when I was a kid was sports and hating everybody for not loving me.

Were you good at sports?

undo wrote:

Ned Braden wrote:Man, all I cared about when I was a kid was sports and hating everybody for not loving me.

Were you good at sports?

I was the best at sports.