Squeezing the Image and Babies on a Plane

OK, two quick rants:

1. What is up with LCD televisions? They are crap. The picture quality on some of the bigger ones is terrible. Pixel trailing galore, poor resolution: why do people buy them? Because other people are buying them? And the worst part: you go to a sports bar, you got to the airport, pretty much any place that has giant LCD screens projecting a TV show, and they ALWAYS stretch the image to fit the widescreen format of the television set. Is this supposed to be high quality? You are STRETCHING the picture. A few years ago, people were complaining that movies got hacked when converted from widescreen to 4:3 for home video release; now, we’re seeing the opposite problem! If it was shot in 4:3, please show it in 4:3. Those black bars on either side of the screen are not distracting: they’re black.

2. If you have a kid under 4 years of age, do not bring him/her on a plane. Please. It’s called respect for the other people on the plane who do not want to hear a baby crying whenever the air pressure changes, whenever the plane takes off, or whenever a new tooth starts to pierce his/her gums. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and I don’t think kids are our future, but I cannot understand parents who bring babies on board planes to go on a cruise. The baby will not enjoy it and you won’t enjoy it either, because you’ll have to shush the baby every 5 minutes. Wait until Junior is old enough to appreciate the plane ticket and the ride. Sheesh.

Was that too harsh?

The Men Who Stare at the Screen

… thinking “I just spent $12.50 to see this crap”.

I just came back from a screening of THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS. The trailer made it look like a smart and funny film. The reviews were positive.

And there I am, sitting in the theater, watching as nothing happens.

Bland, unfunny script. Miscasting of the leads. Snail-paced editing.

Jesus, how can people fund this stuff? Who sat down reading this script and thought, “That’s mighty funny!”

A miscast Ewan McGregor (affecting a somewhat shaky American accent) ends up on an interesting lead: after the Vietnam War, the Pentagon funded a special program to develop super-warriors. Jedis. Soldiers who could stop fights with the power of their minds… and a little help from the Predator (arguably the funniest bit in the movie). The best Jedi of them all? No, not Ewan McGregor (OK, we *get* the joke, movie), but an equally miscast George Clooney. Clooney’s character leads McGregor’s from Kuwait to Iraq on a non-mission while reminiscing once in a while about the good old days of his psy training. The flashbacks are not involving or particularly funny, and they usually stop just when they’ve accumulated a mediocre momentum.

Just when the movie’s about to get funny, it stops. And then starts again.

Rolfe Kent, whose music I generally adore, let me down with a rather minimalist, uninvolving score. This is a movie that screams for an over-the-top score and Robert Downey Jr.

Can someone post this movie on YouTube, digitally replacing McGregor with Downey Jr.? Anyone? Does anyone have Cameron’s phone number? Or Lucas’s?

Invited at the Table

You know how, when your college application gets rejected, you get the small envelope (the we-didn’t-want-to-waste-stamps envelope) and, when you get in, you get the big envelope, with the full brochure, and the rules, and the registration forms, and the pictures of the kids laughing in the quad as if studying organic chemistry for four years is one big party?

I got the big envelope today.

Mensa finally answered back.

From the half-torn envelope (from the mailman trying to squeeze it into my box) fell a business card with the Mensa logo, my member number and name and, to boot, the expiration date: Dec. 31 2010. See, the proctor had told us that, if you get in, Mensa gives you free membership for the rest of the year. Her smile had soured when she said, “Since you guys are taking the test in September, well, you won’t get as much mileage from it, but it’s better than nothing”. Either Mensa is usually this generous or they felt bad for the huge delay in processing, but I got myself a nice 13.5-month membership for free. Thank God. The $90 exam fee is a little steep.

I got the latest magazine from Mensa Society, a handbook (so detailed about who gets to vote when it made me think I had joined a political party), and the results of my exams.

I underwent two exams back-to-back. The first was this ridiculously old SCAT test (from the 1950s or something, I swear, you could carbon-date the thing), which consisted of a timed verbal section, followed by a timed arithmetic (or more logical) section. I got 91 answers right out of a total of 100, which places me in the 99th percentile. Mensa admits members in the 98th percentile and above.

The second test is the crazy one. It’s called the Wonderlich test and it’s 50 questions… in 12 minutes. Never in my life have I been more focused on a task. My brain was racing and I managed to finish the damn thing, leaving only 3 questions unanswered. The proctor admitted that most people don’t finish the test, and it’s a really hard one.

I scored 35 out of 50 (a little disappointed in myself ). The average score on the test was reported as 24.

So, fine, I guess the tests confirm I’m gifted, which is somewhat of a relief even though, true, the test does not evaluate every kind of intelligence.

Now I get to meet other gifted individuals living in the greater metropolitan area. And now we’ll see if I manage to make some friends who can talk about something other than the latest Vince Vaughn movie.

I just hope I don’t end up in a room with 45 people solving puzzles every month.

Ruminations on Death

A post on someone else’s blog has inspired me (hopefully) to write something about death before I go to bed. It’s just a little something. It won’t hurt at all, I promise. Now… close your eyes.

And imagine it stops.

Everything.

Your senses. Your heartbeat. Your thoughts. Your breathing.

Time. Time stops. And you cease to exist.

Now tell me this isn’t the scariest thing you can think of.

You’re not even there to contemplate the end of the road. Your consciousness dissolves. You no longer are.

It is such a scary thought… one that I find almost impossible to fully imagine. You cease to be. I’m an atheist so, for me, it’s the end of the line. Other people are “luckier”: they have Heaven to look forward to, or Nirvana, or some variation thereof involving Mozart and Bach playing the harpsichord or 72 dark-haired virgins lined up, debating what they should do for the talent portion.

For me, it’s The End. Your thoughts end. The final period.

 

 

No wonder people turn to religion. If people have trouble keeping up with friends, I can only imagine how impossible it must be to wrestle with a finite existence for the average person. That’s the appeal of religion. “Well, it doesn’t really end, you’ll understand; it goes on, and everyone’s happy, and everyone’s held accountable for what they did, and it’s all right.”

I wish. I wish it were that simple.

I just don’t buy into the wishful thinking.

So I’m left with The End.

Better do something worthwhile before The End, then. Because when I reach that final period, there’s no rewind button and there’s no “Please Insert Disc 2″.

Mensans in Disarray

I took the Mensa entrance exam 7 weeks ago, wanting to know my IQ to see how different I was from the people around me. I’ve been expecting so much out of everyone all of my life, thinking we were all the same; now I’m thinking that might have been wrong.

The fact I hadn’t received any news from Mensa in 7 weeks (even though we were supposed to get our results within 4 to 6) made me think I wasn’t in. Which, as full of myself as it might sound, was extremely puzzling to me. It’s a bit like you’re looking for the solution to a problem, you finally find one that fits perfectly, and then you realize that wasn’t it.

Well, I just got an email from the local rep for Mensa saying that there have been some changes in personnel over at Mensa and this explains the lack of proper follow-up on entrance exams. So our exams might not even have been looked over yet….

So… there is hope, I guess.

The Positive Strand

Every gifted person is different in his or her abilities and flaws. We’re all unique: just because we’re very smart doesn’t make us into facsimiles.

I would love to hear from other gifted individuals and the things they can do and how their brain works.

A lot of the things I can do I took for granted all of my life. I thought this is what everyone else can do. Now that I know “what” I am, I am trying really hard to distinguish between the things an average person can and cannot do.

When I’m part of a discussion involving more than one other person, I’m able to put myself in their heads. I not only follow the verbal exchanges; I also feel their reactions, anticipate what they will say, analyze every word, gesture, and facial expression to get an accurate representation of their thought process. This works extremely well if I know the people. And all this is empathic. If they are suddenly shamed by something someone has said, I feel the shame too, right down to the blushing. I used to think everyone did that, but I’ve recently begun to doubt that.

I can impersonate a lot of people really well, right down to the vocabulary they would use, the way they pronounce individual sounds, the way their faces react to certain situations, the way they move, their verbal cadence. I’ve fooled a few people over the years (sometimes over the phone, and sometimes in the same room). The way I do it, my brain splits the audio stream into two whenever someone talks to me, because I’m equally interested in the content and the messenger. So I notice inflections, individual sounds, choice of words, while also understanding what they are saying. I love hearing a new person talk, trying to figure out where they’re from using subtle phonetic clues. I find that most people don’t do that but, again, for me, this is natural. It’s how I build a construct of a person in my mind.

I pay special attention to music. My library currently holds almost 10,000 songs or pieces (22 days of music), and I can usually identify a piece after the first 2 seconds, just by the note, chords, type of recording, instruments used, amount of reverb, etc. By listening to pieces over and over, including a lot of orchestral pieces, I start memorizing every line and rhythm, until I can hum the whole piece and anticipate awkward meter jumps.

I learn a lot of crafts by myself. Photography is a recent one. I’ve received a lot of very positive feedback on the pictures I take, and most people ask me if I’ve taken courses, and the answer is no. I just understand the language of photography almost instinctively. I picked up one book, to learn more about aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. The rest is experimentation. I take a picture, learn from it, and get better with the second one, learn from that, and repeat.

Dabrowski called it overexcitabilities of the senses. A lot of gifted people apparently “suffer” from it. Your brain analyzes more data in the visual input, the auditory input, the tactile input, etc. You see better, hear better, taste better. Of course, the downfall, for me anyway, is that a mess is extremely distracting, bright lights give me headaches, and arhythmic noises can be particularly nagging. It’s hard to develop filters.

I can write. I can compose. I can take great pictures. I can shoot video and edit it into a pretty strong film. I can do science really well, too. I have an affinity for languages. I can philosophize and debate pretty well.

But none of it seems strange to me. It’s just a part of who I’ve always been. I look at an art form and know I can be good at it. So I attempt it and it works out. It doesn’t seem special to me, and it always surprises when the people around me are amazed by it.

Then, how do you explain to them that, no, you can’t spend your entire life doing that. That that is not the only thing you’re good at. That it’s not that easy.

What do you choose to do with your life when your talent is apparently limitless?

“I’m Mork. Will You Be My Friend?”

I love it when TV shows or movies show a really smart, geeky guy and the leagues of friends he has. Especially when, at work, the following day, I hear someone say they would totally date a guy like that. (For example, the number of times I’ve heard girls say they would totally date Jim from THE OFFICE….)

The truth is, according to me anyway, very different. I’ve been incapable of keeping friends for very long in the past 10 years. Meanwhile, I see people dating utter bores with no personality, and I think to myself, “Is this what’s appealing? Boredom? Passivity? Commonality?“

The ultimate destruction of all of my friendships is what led me to therapy, but not to bitch about the assholes in my life. No, you see, I went in there thinking there must be something wrong with me for all my friendships to fail. It was a clear case of “me” or “everyone else” and, being a scientist, my logical answer was “me”.

The problem was “me”. I just couldn’t see what I was doing wrong.

What a relief to find out from my therapist that the problem was… everybody I had befriended. This wasn’t actually a relief; it was the last thing I wanted to hear. See, when the problem is with you, you have the power to change and solve the problem. When the problem is everyone else, there’s not much you can do.

The salt in the wound, of course, is when these friends would compliment me once in a while, talking about what a great guy I was, and how generous I was, and smart and incredibly funny. And then, it seemed, they would run away. Is the world masochistic? If I were to find someone who was smart, generous, and incredibly funny, I think, I dunno, I’d hang out with him as much as possible and consider myself lucky to have him in my life.

The reasoning these people seemed to have, however, from what I could make out (and I could be wrong), is that my life is so well organized, and I’m so successful, that I don’t need them and their problems in my life. I probably don’t want to put up with their banal problems, seeing as I’ve got it all figured out, so they disappear.

I once worked in the same building as a friend of mine for an entire year. I had been friends with her for 7 years. She never came to see me at work. She said she had to be at her station all the time, for fear of losing her job, which was utter bullshit. The few times I did go and see her (in the beginning, before I lost interest), she was on the phone with her mom, and casually wasting her time on the Internet.

I once asked a good friend of mine to forward my mail to the new country I had moved to. I said I would pay for it. She did it for the first time 8 months after my move. It’s been another 7 months since then, and I still haven’t received anything, and I know what I should have received (multiple subscriptions, for one).

The list goes on.

I’ve decided to change my approach to socializing. It seems I expected too much out of a small group of friends, so I’ve given up on the concept of friendship and am trying to meet as many new people as possible. I meet them on and off on a semi-regular basis, but I have no attachments.

I once was friends with a guy who asked to be my pen pal after I was to move away to another country. He wanted to correspond on pen and paper because he was old fashioned, you see, according to him anyway. He had antiquated notions of friendship and correspondance. Well, he did not, for the letters quickly became shorter and shorter and then they simply stopped. Why? Laziness.

Laziness and self-centeredness have killed friendships.

And that really sucks.

On Existential Crises

You know the kind of reputation you get among average people when you tell them you’ve gone through a couple of trigger-less existential crises and you’re not even 30 yet? I wouldn’t know, because I’m too scared to do it, but I’m guessing the word “melodramatic” would get thrown around a bit.

“Oh yeah,” they’d say, “existential crisis. Suuure, Mr. Big Words. Sure, we believe you.”

I didn’t really believe myself either. It’s a bit like that Somebody Else’s Problem field in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’d go through one, then dismiss it afterwards. Surely, it couldn’t have been that. I mean, that only happens when your parents die, or your child dies, or your significant other dies. There’s always death involved in an existential crisis. It never just happens.

Well, it does to gifted people, as it were.

We think ourselves into an existential crisis. We overprocess the information around us to the point where it alters our mood, cognition, and then our entire mental being.

It’s happened to me a few times already. It’s never pretty. You become wrapped in a cocoon of aloneness cognizance. You know exactly how utterly alone you are in the world and that feeling pervades your life. You gradually fail to see the point of everything you do. You see the crumbling of your social life, love life, work life, family life–it all collapses into the void of relativism.

What pushes you over the edge is this overexcitability of the senses that allows you to see every action and every situation in your day as part of an endless loop. You see people repeating themselves and repeating their mistakes. You see everyone’s personality so clearly, the way it defines and limits them. You see the same discussions and fights you’ve had for the past year. And it all becomes futile.

The last time I went through this was a few months ago. It was the most serious and darkest crisis I have ever had. It led to very solid and pervasive thoughts of suicide. At first, I thought I was experiencing burn out due to work. And then, through the beauty of the Internet, I found myself reading a paper on the overabundance of existential crises among gifted individuals.

“Gifted what now?”

I had always suspected I was different, multitalented, perhaps even the G-word (not the one Jews are afraid of spelling out; the one that condemns you to years of torture in high school). But it was this ugly creature of the mind, this thing I didn’t want to touch or acknowledge. Surely, I couldn’t be that. Surely, I was like most people. Right?

Realizing I was gifted and learning about Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration gave me a reason to live and, most importantly, something to look forward to. When you’re at Level III, in the midst of a crisis, it’s easy to think there’s nothing beyond the crisis stage. Dabrowski showed me what Level IV was all about, and it made sense, and now I have a goal.

Existential crises don’t have to be the Big Bad. When you’re gifted, you can hardly avoid them. It’s like being a lycanthrope. You have the tame the beast, because the beast isn’t gonna go away. It’s a part of you. It’s ugly and dark as hell, but you have to take control of it.

Is This On? (Or Why the Double Helix)

Is this mic turned on? Is this working? Can you hear me? One two… check… check. Two Mormons walk into a bar… then walk right out, ’cause they’re Mormons.

Why “The Double Helix of Giftedness”? Who am I? “Doctor John Smith?? Seriously??”.

I work with DNA and giftedness is like DNA. It is composed of two strands that are complementary to each other. You can’t have one without the other. Well, if you heat DNA up to 95 degrees, it does become single stranded. Likewise, when the heat is on, the strands of giftedness can detach and you get a very skewed version of it.

On the one hand, there’s the “gift”. The multipotentiality that comes with giftedness can be amazing and exhilarating.

On the other hand, there’s the “edness”–err, I mean “curse” aspect of it. The aloneness. The constant stress at not being able to fulfill the potential of all you could do. The daily realization that the world is fucked up and that one person cannot make a difference. The overexcitabilities. The sense of social justice which hits you like a dagger in the gut every single day.

I am not expecting legions of fans to flock to this site. I am not even sure how long I can maintain this little experiment. I’m much better with fiction, I’m afraid. But, hey, I’ll give it a try. I had to quit my therapist after two sessions because she was dry. There wasn’t anything else she could do for me. So I’m hoping this accelerates the autotherapy and, who knows, allows me to meet other “gifties” like myself.

I know you’re out there. Well, you’re not alone.

We don’t have a cool Bat-signal or Superman-calling rings. We’ll just have to come up with something cooler. I’m thinking portable holograms.