I can come across as reasonably intelligent in person, but I don’t get much respect when people find out the particulars. In San Francisco, usually it’s because these people went to Berkeley or Stanford, or figured that if they had grown up around here they would’ve gone to Berkeley or Stanford. Often they are casually condescending in this way that is all, like, “Gee, that is pretty smart of you!” I think they think they’re being encouraging, or something. This is annoying.

When people from my past reconnect with me, they generally assume that I must have a doctorate at this point or I must have gone to some Incredible School and that I must have aspirations along the lines of Running the Free World or something.

Then I tell them the particulars about my life, and it’s like they are all collectively saying, “Wow Melodee, you sure had a good thing going ten years ago, and you clearly fucked it up.”

This, too, is annoying.

Here’s the problem: we basically have three ways of judging success in a person. They are:

1) Academic success.
2) Professional success, i.e., “I make shit tons of money.”
3) Personal success, i.e., marriage and children.

Usually people can feel secure in at least one of those three. Sometimes this security is pretty shaky, but it’s there. Lots of people feel secure in two of those things, and some people feel secure in all three.

But if you can’t claim ANY of those as a success, well then, DAMN, you must be a loser.

I think part of my personal problem is that I never put stock in any of those things. I know I say that and I sound like I’m full of shit, considering, but really, that’s just the way it pretty much has always been for me. As a kid, I never gave much of a damn what other people were doing enough to compare myself to them much either positively or negatively. This is actually called being “self-centered.” I like to think of it as being “wise beyond my years” or “damn I was SO SECURE when I was younger and ‘self-centered’; why can’t I be cool like that now?! wtf?!”

Maybe it’s part of having grown up Jewish and around a lot of affluent people who had happy families and impeccable academic credentials, but I never thought that those things had much influence on whether or not someone was a total douchebag. Because believe you me, some of the biggest douches from douchetown I knew were Stanford grads making $250K+ with husbands/wives from similar backgrounds and perfect children who perfectly enjoyed tormenting me so much so that I spent much of Hebrew school in fifth grade HIDING IN THE FUCKING BATHROOM so no one would bother me. These perfect children all went on to Ivies/Stanford/Berkeley and are busily repeating the cycle.

This is why people get annoyed with me for being judgmental, I think. It’s because I’m judgmental about things that other people let slide. Like, it’s OK to be totally illiterate if you had a 4.0 from Yale, say, but for me, I don’t care about your GPA or your higher education or your socioeconomic background or your VP position at Google or the fact that your family owns a fucking vineyard in Sonoma (these are true-to-life examples), I DO care that you haven’t read any Virginia Woolf past Mrs. Dalloway and can’t, in fact, recall the fucking main character of that book (HINT: it’s in the fucking title).

Other people are all, oh, it’s OK he spells “weird” like “wierd,” he’s just not that good at spelling. No, it’s not. “Oh, it’s OK that she consistently puts commas outside of the quotation marks like she’s from the fucking UK, she majored in biochemistry at blahblahblah.” She’s a moron. It’s fine, most people think she’s better than 99.9% of the population. She certainly does. It won’t kill her to have one person who thinks she’s not so great. Especially coming from one person who is so CLEARLY a loser in others’ eyes.

Everyone thinks this is all sad and sour grapes, but really, it’s not. It’s just annoyance that other people can’t come up with better ways to be an elitist asshole.

“Better ways to be an elitist asshole” = the how-to book I’ll be writing after this semester’s over.

This is a problem in some of my English classes, where guys think A) they’re being “edgy” by rejecting the work of female writers or calling them overrated and B) act like your opinions, no matter what, are based on nothing except for your own “feelings.” These guys get angry when you talk about feminism or sexism when discussing some text, even in the most innocuous way, because they think that kind of analysis is stupid, basically. Why? Because it’s analysis by WOMEN. And what do THEY know? Even if you bring up feminism ONCE in class, you get the disrespect. And of course, it’s so OMG EDGY to denounce feminism in class. You will win the approval of the dudes in class. And isn’t that what it’s all about?

One of my favorite professors at USF was telling me that s/he was going to try to cover something about feminism in an English class not geared towards discussing feminism, but then decided not to because s/he didn’t want to have to listen to it. I’m being vague here to protect the innocent, but basically the gist is s/he didn’t want to have to hear all the girls fall all over themselves trying to be as cool and therefore antifeminist as possible, while the two guys in the class brought up their points and summarily dismissed feminist literary analysis as being simplistic and reactionary.

What happens in some of my classes at every single college I’ve attended, even when the school is overwhelmingly female like USF, is that the girls will sit there in silence while some boy Explains To Them The World. And for me, or any other girl that regularly participates, we receive the bulk of the antagonism from the guys (who don’t respect us as we are clearly, clearly intellectually inferior) AND from the girls (because we are being unsexy and uncute by voicing opinions and disagreeing with the Cool Smart Guys). It’s great.

People overestimate how much girls contribute to class. People often think I’m taking over the discussion. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I do it on purpose to showcase my awesomeness. But because I’m often the ONLY female in the class talking at all, I stick out more. As a result, I’ve had professors talk to me after class about “piping down” when I may have said two things in class that day versus some other guy’s ten things.

Girls in class put in disclaimers, which I don’t. “I think the author is maybe saying….” “I could be wrong, but I feel like there is some symbolism here with….” I say, “This is this and that is that.” So do the guys, but who gets attacked on it? Not them.

Anyway here’s a hilarious article in the LA Times about a writer who had her own book recommended to her by a guy who thought she didn’t know what she was talking about:

http://latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-solnit13apr13,0,526991.story

I mean, right? Some choice quotes:

“Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”

“A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk when a writer friend invited me to a dinner that included a male translator and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential and mostly silent throughout the meal. Perhaps the translator was peeved that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but when I said something about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known antinuclear and antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, Mr. Very Important II sneered at me. The House committee, he insisted, no longer existed in the early 1960s and, anyway, no women’s group played such a role in its downfall. His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.

I had written a book that drew from primary documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. But explaining men still assume that I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch — even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf’s long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. Back in my hotel room, I Googled a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike for Peace with “striking the crucial blow in the fall of HUAC’s Bastille.” In the early 1960s.

Dude, if you’re reading this, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.”

I was hoping there might be a guy that would claim bisexuality as a label, but sadly, there were none beyond an FTM dude who, you know, was using typical Judith-Butler-esque language. Also, gender is fluid, blah blah, and labels are stifling, etc. etc. Whatever.

More hilariously, I met Professor Chemistry Lady AKA Rachel-Crawford’s-Partner. So now I think I’ve officially met every gay full-time professor at USF. But I’m not sure if all of them are full-time GAY, if you get my meaning, and I think you do.

About three majors ago, I took a few hundred classes in psychology. I’m also the kid of two LAUSD (LA Unified School District) teachers, so let me tell you, if you’re in California, and someone who grew up in California starts talking to you about their childhood IQ scores or their children’s IQ scores, here’s how you can tell when someone is full of shit:

1) IQ tests need to be given by a psychologist or a psychometrist (who is usually a psychologist/statistician). This can be done one-on-one and, sometimes, in a group, but it can’t be taken at your home and it can’t be taken without supervision. They are given usually by schools, but there are also private testing facilities. If you want to be sure of the validity of the test, make sure it’s free. If it costs money, then it’s very often (but NOT always) full of shit. This means that a TON of private testing facilities are full of shit. These are scores that are not accepted by the magnet schools for gifted kids and so forth, but these scores ARE accepted by high-IQ societies like Mensa which, of course, is also an organization for insecure people who want to pay like $15 to take a test to prove their smartness. Mensa accepts a wide range of IQ tests, but they also give their own test.

2) IQ tests are usually given to second graders. People think this is done because this is best for validity. Actually, it’s done because at seven-years-something-months, a kid can still take the preschool version of Weschsler’s. This is sketchy for several reasons, but the main one being that if you’re dealing with a seven-year-old who has been reading for a few years then you’re NOT dealing with the seven-year-old that’s supposed to take this specific pre-literate test. The test is supposed to be for kids who can’t read. If your kid can read well above a beginning reader, ethically speaking, another test should be given. But this isn’t usually done because shitloads of parents would have heart attacks.

3) IN CALIFORNIA, two tests are given to test IQs in children. The first one is a complete-the-matrix multiple choice test. Most people take this one because it’s simpler to give and it doesn’t have to do with math/verbal skills. This makes it great for kids with learning disabilities and autism. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a legit test — it definitely is. Some argue that it is really the only consistently decent IQ test to date. It gives scores in percentages. Getting in the top 98% means your kid is gifted. It DOES NOT give scores like 100, 75, 130, etc. It used to, but it hasn’t since like 1980. Therefore, most people shouldn’t even know their “traditional score” IQ “number” if they took a legit IQ test as a child.

4) That said, many parents aren’t satisfied with this test so they make them take the WISC-III aka Weschsler’s which reports scores in the traditional fashion. How can they brag to their friends if they only know that Johnny got into the 99% range, which is basically 130+? THEY NEED TO KNOW THE SPECIFICS. (Less cynically, sometimes it’s good to know more specifically for actual reasons that aren’t ego-driven, of course. For CA schools, to get the “highly gifted” versus the mere “gifted” label, you have to have your kid take Weschler’s in addition to the matrices test.)

5) Again, remember, there’s the preschool Weschsler’s which most second graders are taking. There’s another test that is used for an overlap age range in the preschool version up to age 10 for kids who can read. And lastly, there’s the “older children” WISC-III, generally given to 10-16 year olds. Again, there’s the problem of people getting their 16-year-olds JUST under the cut-off to get them a chance at getting the “best possible score,” but abuses of this nature are less rampant and less effective, really.

6) The Weschsler’s tests for children — all of them — have a ceiling of 160. YOU CANNOT SCORE HIGHER THAN A 160 ON A WESCHSLER’S TEST THAT HAS BEEN DESIGNED FOR CHILDREN. When someone tells you that they got a 180 on a test that a psychologist administered to them in California, they are almost always wrong.

7) You CAN get scores of like 190 or 220 and so on if you take the WAIS (grownup Weschsler’s) or the Stanford-Binet. But it’s very, very hard to find anyone that gives the Stanford-Binet test. California schools have not been using the Stanford-Binet test for some time. The Stanford-Binet test gives much higher scores in part because it was developed NOT to test gifted children/adults, but to give definitive scores for people with mental retardation. It was good at this for its time, but better tests have been developed (unfortunately, a lot of kids with various neurological problems, learning disorders, and autism were getting very low IQ scores on the S-B when they were actually of normal or above-average intelligence. This was a big fucking oops).

8) Back in the day, LAUSD used to give kids multiple IQ tests — one at seven, one at 12-ish, and one at 16. Also, back in the day, they were using Stanford-Binet or Cattell, which do not have a ceiling of 160. Perhaps surprisingly to the developers of the IQ tests who thought that scores would remain constant, they kind of didn’t. So there are a ton of adults around here who took several IQ tests. Both the schools and the testees will always report their best score to you and to everyone. What all this has done is create a whole slew of studies talking about how kids are getting more stupid these days. These studies are then used for OTHER studies who want to blame whatever modern thing that bothers the researchers for making us all so dumb. In other words, about every fifth study that’s ever been done on the effects of watching TV, playing video games, etc. will cite some of this bullshit.

Just for the record, I don’t blame kids for believing their parents who tell them that they have scores of 190. They just become very annoying adults. I don’t always blame the parents, either. A lot of times, they just can’t read the test scores properly, or are never even given any official test scores, or whatever. Sometimes teachers fuck this up, but teachers aren’t psychologists either, so it’s not completely their fault either. It’s just really messy and annoying, because on the one hand, none of this matters. But on the other hand, IQ scores are given so much reverence and respect for whatever reason and people sometimes use their scores to torture themselves or make themselves feel erroneously better about themselves or what have you. And that’s all bad enough, but it’s ESPECIALLY bad when you’re not even dealing with correct information in the first place.

It just becomes really sad when you’re reading an online parenting community, for instance, and someone is feeling horrible about their child “only” having a score of 140 or something. That is an extremely high IQ, but they don’t realize that. It’s sadder when the parent goes, “I have an IQ of 170 and my sister has an IQ of 192 and my mother has an IQ of 168 and my husband has an IQ of 196, so why does my son have such a low IQ?” It makes me want to go, “LADY, your son is probably smarter than all of you because he is likely the only one with a valid score, but why don’t you just go ahead and make him feel intellectually inferior for his whole childhood and let him grow up to resent you? Sounds like a good plan.”

Please join us for a dialogue on bisexuality, facilitated by Dr. Molly Zook from the USF Counseling Center tommorrow, Thursday, April 17  from 12:30-1:15pm in Cowell 429.

To enhance community dialogue these conversations are informally structured.  All USF students, faculty, staff, and straight allies are welcome to participate.  For more information, contact 422-6742.”

I used to go through this thing, where I would write something that I thought was awesome based on my own completely insane standards and I would submit it somewhere/workshop it/whatever and get it brutally attacked. People didn’t understand, as people sometimes ON THE INTERNETS don’t understand in these blog posts par example that when I’m leaving out commas and writing in long run-on sentences and randomly capitalizing words I’m doing so because it IS HILARIOUS. I’ve been doing the “self-assured moron” thing in stories/poems/etc. for YEARS now, but the problem is is that there are so many people who are really bad writers, no one seems to get that I’m adopting that style on purpose.

What makes me amused is that, for example, I also regularly help people write papers when I’m feeling generous. I just helped a girl revise her paper that her professor kindly let her edit for credit and I got her from a 1/10 to an 8.5/10. The professor was so impressed with my editing skills (basically having someone write better in their own voice using vocabulary that they already know via collaborative editing as opposed to, like, the kind of editing that’s offered in the writing lab on campus) that he offered me a job TA-ing for his class. I’m declining because I don’t have time, energy, or the general psychological toughness to sit through any kind of Written Communication class.

Another recent happening consisted of a friend of mine, who is also an English major, who doesn’t go to USF, who I’ve been sort-of-but-not-really friends with for a long time, who is finally going to let me help him with a paper because if he fails this class he can’t graduate, which is a somewhat likely possibility, was reading my papers that I sent him because of course he has to be an asshole and needs to see “examples of my work,” and IMing me like, “Holy shit Melodee, you can actually write academically. I mean, I knew you got good grades when we took classes together back in the day, but I mean, you can actually do this and I mean, make it kind of interesting and fun to read. WTF! I AM SO JEALOUS!” And I was like, hell yeah, beeyotch. And then I burst into flame from my hotness.

I could go on, but I won’t. BUT I COULD. Maybe this is why I’m such a fan of obnoxious literary meta/psychogeographical/post-post-colonial/self-imposed-exile/anti-hipster-hipster/self-conscious/bourgie/neurotic/totally gay fiction.

But see, eventually it becomes like the old saying, “Well, I would’ve chosen option A because that’s what MOST people would choose, so instead I should choose option B, except I KNOW that YOU KNOW that people might think that’s the ‘clever’ choice, so I will choose option A, but then maybe you might think I’m dumb enough to go for option A in the first place and might REALLY have it under option B and then you’ll think I’m dumb for choosing option A, or maybe YOU KNOW that I KNOW these justifications/problems so I should choose option A without shame, or maybe it’s just simply that you know my ‘anti-clever’ argument so intricately that I should just choose option B because maybe you won’t carry it that far, or maybe you’ve carried it much further and I need to figure out exactly when you would’ve stopped and I should be able to do that but I can’t, so WHAT DO I DO?!?!”

Anyway, after writing something along those lines and having everyone Not Get It and feeling both angry that I Am So Misunderstood and embarrassed for being such a fucking elitist, I usually write something in standard “good” formula. And then I get published, win an award, the admiration of the pseudo-intellectuals in San Francisco coffee shops, fanmail, etc. I know exactly what people want and I can deliver it, but I hate to do that because I AM JUST THAT ARROGANT.