LUDIC LOG

I receieved an (apparently long in coming) chewing out from my mom today about my failure to turn my alleged great intelligence into cold hard cash. The gist of it was that, since I have not been willing or able to convert my purportedly massive brainpower into a high-paying career, I am a big fat loser. Well, to be fair to mom, she didn't actually say "loser", but rather the parentally approved version, which is "disappointment".

Now, it's not as if this was news to me. I've heard it all before, from my dad, from my relatives, from my employers, and from any number of bad family dramas on the upper reaches of basic cable. It's no surprise to hear a variation of "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"; it's how America deals with its standoffish relationship with intellectuals. It's not even as if it's a surprise; my mom is from a different generation, when a college degree actually made a big difference, when undergraduates could look forward to a career rather than just an endless series of meaningless jobs to pay off their hypertrophic student loans. I certainly can't fault her for her perception that her only child has thrown away all that potential the grade school teachers pretended I had, way back then.

The real bitch of it is, I agree with her.

By society's standards -- which are no less valid than my own -- I'm a total failure. Not only don't I have a good job (or any job, at the moment), but I don't even particularly want a good job. I'm totally lacking in ambition, career aspirations, or any competitive fire whatsoever; I don't know if I could keep a good job even if someone gave me one, because I really don't care about work. If I did, I wouldn't be a temp. All I'm really interested in is reading and writing. Someday I hope someone will publish my mediocre scribblings and give me a big fat check I can live off of for a while, but failing that, I just hope for a nice secure boring job that pays my rent, fends off my creditors and lets me go out for a beer every once in a while. Whenever I hear the word "career", I reach for my pillow.

So, I'm a loser. And I won't argue with anyone who calls me that. They're right, and they're as entitled to their own view of what society should and shouldn't accept as I am to mine. I made my choice to live on the margins, to reject the standards that my time and place have valorized, to say "no thanks" the the canape tray that Lady Liberty is passing around this particular party. And I live with that, as painful as it is at times. I won't change for the world; but nor can I expect them to change for me.

That's the funny thing about intelligence: it rarely does what you want it to. Religions often make a choice to encourage education in their young; but the unfortunate result, for them, is that education often engenders a lack of faith, an uncomfortable doubt, a turning away. Our economic and political system gives us an unprecedented level of personal freedom and access to information; those tools are sometimes used to the purpose of showing how corrupt, greedy and hurtful that economic and political system is. And sometimes, when you encourage someone to read and think and learn, he might read and think and learn things that lead him to believe that all the reasons you had for wanting him to be smart are empty and hollow, and that he doesn't want to have anything to do with it. How sharper than a serpent's tooth is a monkey who says 'no'!

Of course, I can live with all that. I've long ago discovered that I can be perfectly happy with my self-imposed exile from the Land Where Consumer is King, because I really don't care about the judgements of society. For every "if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?", I've got a dozen "if you're so rich, why aren't you smart?"s. But it's too bad that my mom had to get broken on my wheel of self-defeating restlessness. Though she'd never understand -- or even care about -- the metaphor, I'm sorry she had to be Tolstoy's wife.