Smart (not as in Elizabeth; she's going on a mission to Paris, France)

I hate pretentious people, but I do consider myself smarter than most of the people I interact with daily. It may also be deemed useful information to some of my audience that 90% of the people I interact with daily are 14 and 15 years old. However, I haven't always been very smart, a fact I will probably rewrite in my memoirs at a later date. In fact, my early educational experience, if evaluated in a single context, may denote a learning disability (I'm not picking on those with "troubles," I'm just glad mine were temporary). One such shame comes when reading my Kindergarten class's Christmas Cookbook. The task was to tell Mrs. Hanneman (stereotypical lower grade teacher who looked like the grandma from a Goldenbook, and was from the most mysterious place I could imagine at that time. Alaska!) our favorite food and how to make it. What I understand now that I didn't as a 5 year old is that Mrs. Hanneman knew that we didn't know how to cook. That the real "gift" we were giving that holiday season was a gag. But while my classmates chose foods like toast and cookies in which they got a few of the ingredients correct, I explained the following recipe, which left my mom feeling a bit sheepish about her dietary decision making at the time and me the class idiot.

Favorite food: "Taco Bell Tostadas"

How to make it: "First you get a burrito (hmm?), and put a salad on top (interesting)."

After Mrs. Hanneman probes for a cook time, I respond with, "Put it in the microwave for 2 seconds."

Ugh. Unfortunately the real humiliation from this event didn't set in until a summer day between 2nd and 3rd grade when I was feeling a bit nostalgic about "the good old days" and decided to rummage through my old school memories (no doubt organized by my sister Lacy, who in the 1st grade had the foresight to label all of her papers from Kindergarten with a "K" and those from 1st grade with a "1," a tradition she has bragged about ever since). Nonetheless, I was disheartened by my poor performance at an early age. However, soon I was properly socialized and institutionalized into the realization that school is a competition. Ah. Cue the next 16 years of schooling in which I only felt good about an academic achievement so long as someone else was beneath me. We call this the American Dream.

But today, at age 26, it is much harder rank myself in the adult world. People feel funny about sharing their ACT scores. Weird. That is unless they are a self-made millionaire who scored below their numerical age at the time of taking it, and in this instance, they share their score as a way of proving that brains are useless and money is a "blessing." That is why the only real measure adults have to distinguish a person's intelligence is through the radio. Huh? Yeah, the only remaining indicator as to whether or not someone should fill out a MENSA application relies completely on whether or not they listen to NPR. You see, this person listens to Harvard grads discuss topics they may or may not understand. But at a party, they can regurgitate enough of the argument to confuse their listener and take the credit as their own original thought. The idea is, if you can keep interest, despite the melodic tones of the show hosts of "This American Life" and the "Jim Leher Newshour," you are smart by default. If you heard a funny joke on "Wait, Wait, Dont Tell Me" about a current event, or a science factoid on "Radio Lab," the guesswork is over. Yep, you're smart. You probably have a newspaper subscription, and it's probably not the USA Today (smart people, you know what I'm talking about).

The point: I have an NPR podcast that helps me go to sleep on wakeless nights. Need I say more?