Intellectu-what?
Well, I don’t quite know what I did to deserve this, but I simply must set the record straight about a few things.
The Goth-kitties were very poorly behaved (Didi spent most of Tom and Jill’s visit behind the couch, and Dream wouldn’t shut his yappy mouth), the house has been better, and you can meet my level of intellect any day serving FriesWithThat.
I can’t deny that for some inadequately explored reason I give off smart vibes. A couple years back David and I visited Allen Renear and (what was then) his Scholarly Technology Group at Brown. Just so happens I have a cousin at Brown; she must be a junior or senior by now. (Yes, all right, there are brains in the family. They just skipped me.) Both her parents and mine insisted that while I was there we had to go out to dinner.
She was all of 18 or 19 at the time. Very pretty, very unsure of herself, very much in the middle of figuring out what to do with her life, very embarrassed at not knowing. (If I have any readership in that demographic, here’s my advice: Don’t bother. Honestly. Chances are you’ll end up doing something you never imagined, so why feel you have to lock yourself in now?)
Good taste in boyfriends, though; she dragged hers along, and he turned out to be a sharp Shakespeare student. So we talked about Lear and Henry IV, Part I and a couple other plays…
…and when I told my mom about it later she said, “You know, you intimidated the poor girl terribly.”
I did? Oh. Oops. Entirely unintentional. I didn’t leave her out of the conversation. I didn’t maunder on endlessly about tech stuff, even though I was giving a techie talk the next day. I was good. I really was. Intimidating?
It’s physical presence. It really is. I couldn’t intimidate a mouse over the phone, but I can see how it’s difficult to argue with a woman five-foot-nine in her stocking feet possessing a voice like a bullhorn. Just an artifact of pure physicality. Shame it should give such a false impression, though.