And I never have.

I was born with a very powerful brain. This brain was further encouraged in its growth by by parents. By the time I went to elementary school (bypassing kindergarten), I towered over my peers on the intellectual plane.

A different sort of person, I suppose, would have taken that advantage and run with it. They would have become a type A overachiever, using their intellectual advantage to get the highest possible grades as part of a grand plan to soar to the highest heights of intellect and status by getting scholarships to all the best schools and meeting the right kind of people and blah blah blah, the usual yuppie life cycle.

But I’m not like that. I honestly do not want to feel superior to others. I want to connect with people, and superiority (and/pr inferiority) precludes that. I am only comfortable in a position of equality. Anything else weirds me out.

And it honestly never occurred to me to work hard to get the best possible grades. I got high marks without even studying. It seemed to me that to sacrifice my carefree ways in order to buckle down and raise my grades by five percentage points was an investment with insufficient returns.

Of course, I see the benefits now. But school was always so easy for me that I never learned to take it seriously.

It’s not like there were immediate rewards for higher grades. My parents wouldn’t have noticed and the school would not have really cared. So my marks went from “very good” to “great”. Big frigging deal!

As a result, I have never really known what to do with this big intellect of mine. Like I have said before in this space, it has just always been there. It never felt like a powerful advantage to me. I never stopped to think “You know, it’s awesome that I don’t have to study or work hard in school. ”

If anything, it felt like a disadvantage. Even in elementary school, I grasped that it was a big part of what separated me from my peers. And even more obviously, it led to me being staggeringly bored in class most of the time.

Bored, and often depressed. Hmmm. Tag that thought. It seems important. I will have to come back to it in a different post.

Because of this disconnect from my intellect, and my social isolation, I never learned the vital lesson of how to play with others. Specifically, I never learned how to moderate the output of my intellect in order to compensate for the power differential between myself and others.

Consequently, dealing with me could be a little like playing tag with the Hulk. In my innocent attempts to just do what others do, I ended up hurting or at the very least bewildering a lot of people. When you give someone a playful punch on the shoulder and they respond by hitting you so hard it bounces your skull off two walls, you kind of don’t want to play with them any more, even if they have no idea what they just did.

Actually, especially if they have no idea what they just did.

“In the last two weeks, Tsu Zei, ” said the Master, “you have cracked the ribs of three students, dislocated the shoulders of two others, and insured that poor Li Tao will not be able to walk for several weeks. ”
“But Master!” protested Tsu Zei, “I’m just doing what all the other students do!”

Of course, I was not trying to hurt or confuse anybody. I was trying to get along with them. It wasn’t my fault that I was the biggest and the strongest, mentally speaking. I wanted to have friends and be gentle with everyone and be happy.

But no matter how pure his intentions, the giant just can’t pretend to be a pygmy and hope to blend in.

I think that is the dark side of my attempts at egalitarianism. By not socially acknowledging my intellect and holding myself to an ideal of equality, my motive was not purely an attempt to do the right thing.

It also neatly sidestepped any need to really take responsibility for the elephant in the room. I could maintain my posture of innocence and not have to accept the burden of greater responsibility that comes with greater power.

But there is only so many times that big elephant can innocently crush your sofa before “sorry!” just doesn’t cut it any more.

Increasingly, I see my innocent attitude as less of an artifact of lofty ideals and more as a refusal to grow up and acknowledge that I can’t play by the same rules as everyone else.

It’s like the classic Superman plotline where a teenaged Clark Kent joins his high school football team and, of course, does amazingly well because he’s fucking Superman.

After the Big Game, he goes home, happy to be the hero of the game and so on, to find Pa Kent waiting there to talk with him and explain that it was not fair at all for Superman to play football against regular humans, and that Clark’s victory was meaningless because of that.

It would be like a grown man crowing over beating a small child at arm-wrestling.

Now if Clark was an asshole, he could have said “Hey, I played the game by the same rules as everyone else. I just happen to be awesome at it. Why should I hold back and not get the same rewards as any other star athlete? How can that be fair?”

And he would be right. It’s not fair. By pure chance, he ended up the guy with the superpowers. Like Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben said, with that great power came great responsibility, far greater than most people are asked to bear.

And that’s not fair.

But that’s the reality of the situation, and the thing is, responsibility does not ask permission. If you have the power, you have the responsibility. Period.

And it’s up to me to figure out what that means for me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was browsing my tablet’s SD card when I came across a whole metric shitload of videos that I have yet to share with you people.

Clearly, this is an intolerable condition which cannot be allowed to persist.

So hatten down your batches, people, cause it’s vidya time!

First off, we have this little number that I recorded a week ago but somehow failed to link anywhere :

See, that’s exactly the sort of thing that marks me as a mental pervert. Things other people worry about don’t worry me at all, but I lay awake nights thinking about tangles or potential energy or the true meaning of the Lion King.

I am pretty sure that I have ranted about potential energy in this space before, but darned if I can find the entry. I don’t seem to have done it either as a blog entry or as a video. Or maybe my Google Fu is just too weak.

Trust me… don’t get me started.

Oh, and I went out on a little excursion today, about which I am quite pleased. Every time I leave the home of my own accord when I dont technically even have to do it is a little victory against my agoraphobia, and another little victory for me learning to go out into the world and enjoy life.

The main reason for going out was to get some lab work done that the people booking the MRI on my knee and the CT on my ear will need before they can book me. Surprisingly, given that it’s primarily kidney function stuff, I did not need to give a urine sample. That turned out to be a good thing, because I stupidly had a good long pee right before I left, so I was running on an empty tank. Dodged a bullet there.

And my, they are getting efficient at LifeLabs (and wow, is it nice to have one a block away). I didn’t have to take a number at all, which is nice. I have never liked taking a number. I appreciate the efficiency and justice of the number-taking system and it sure as heck is better than having everyone just milling around and fighting for attention, but I just don’t like being assigned a number that I have to remember so that I know it’s my turn when I hear said number bellowed.

They just took my CareCard and announced my name and what cubicle to go to, and the tech was superb. She found a vein right away, I felt almost no pain when the needle went in, and she had her three or four tubes in no time at all.

That has got to be a weird job, though. Spending all day taking blood samples. Poking holes in people, many of whom are probably pretty nervous and some of whom will be freaking the fuck out, finding veins and draining blood, dozens of times a day, all day, five days a week.

And that’s just the blood. There must be other stuff they do that is way more gross and/or way more painful and scary. Seems like a pretty thankless job. I hope they get paid well.

Next up, we have some footage of the view off our new balcony, plus a few more aspects of our new apartment in the sky Warning, a little on the shaky side.

I have to admit, an unworthy yuppie-ish side of me wonders how much better the view is from further up the tower and resents those above us for their presumably superior view.

But oh well. You can take the boy out of the middle class…..

After the labwork, I wandered around the strip mall around there. It’s a very Asian place. Definitely a good place to get various Asian cuisines, like Taiwanese, Beijing, Szechuan, and of course, sushi.

No Thai though, at least, none that I saw. That’s too bad. Thai is my fave Asian cuisine amongst the ones that I have tried. I don’t care for pepper, so Szechuan is out for me, but I love curry, so Thai is high on my list of Asian goodness.

They also had two Filipino places (see, you know it’s genuine because they spell it with an F), a restaurant and a bakery. I’ve never had Filipino food. I admit, I am curious, but sort of a chicken when it comes to trying new cuisines not because I am afraid to try new things, but because it means going into an unfamiliar social situation.

Still, who knows, I might work up the nerve to try new things at the strip mall some time. It just takes me a while. I passed the Chinese bakery near PriceSmart (shop smart, shop… PriceSmart) dozens of times before I finally went in and discovered just what a wonderful thing a Chinese BBQ pork bun can be.

Anyhow, I was hungry, so of all the enticing and exotic options in front of me, I ate at a submarine sandwich place. What can I say, I ate at the place where I understood what all the food was. Here’s my video from there :

I instantly liked the place. It has that unpretentious greasy spoon type feeling that I love so much. Nothing fancy, just good food at a good price (seriously, costs slightly less than McD’s) and all served by a very friendly older Asian lady whom I think must be the owner as well as the cook.

And that’s another thing…. my roast beef sub was not just made fresh, it was COOKED fresh. Cooked! She didn’t just slap a piece of cold cut style roast beef on there. She took a slice of actual roast beef out of the freezer and fried that sucker up right in front of me. Holy real food, Batman!

I haven’t had a sub like that since way before the days of Subway. I liked the place so much, it even inspired me to do my first ever Yelp review!

I feel so modern now.

That’s it for me for tonight folks. I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.