what is intelligence...

...i hope it's not the ability to spell. i can't spell and i think of myself as relatviely intelligent. i guess i just don't care about spelling. or grammar. i believe that words are abstracts of ideas and that those ideas are what is most important. i understand the need for some rules. breaking the rules can hurt communication. make people think about your error rather than your idea. some people, anyway. it doesn't make me dumb. however, that being said, what does? what makes any one person able to say that he or she is "smarter" than anyone else. we know that there is this thing called intelligence, however it's spelled, and that it's relative, and that it comes in degrees, something that can be measured, albiet arbitrarily, enough to distinguish one persons level of intelligence against anothers. but what is it? a score on an IQ test? a degree? the ability to solve a crossword puzzle or a jumble faster than someone else? the ability to make good decisions? the ability to "smell" a phony a mile a way?

whatever it is, i used to care a lot about it, and how i compared to others. i've always felt that i never really fit in with other people, and felt the need to rationalize why. i believed, perhaps because i wanted to believe, that it was simply because i was smarty than most people. so, last night, i took a test for mensa. i'm pretty sure i failed. now i'm bitter and resentful. just kidding. however, i think that failing the test has given me a new perspective. more acurately, it has forced me to re-rationalize my rationalization as to why i'm socially inept. i could always take the coward's way out: i'm so smart, the tests are too stupid to understand my level of intelligence. but i'm not a coward. i'm brutally honest with myself, or at least, i like to think i am. in fact, it's my brutal honesty, combined with a above-average, sub-genius, level of intelligence, that makes me unable to cope in noraml society. anyway, that's my story, and, until i get some information that conflicts with it, i'm sticking to.