And other things, presumably. I doubt I can get 1000 words out of this.

Anyhow, for those who don’t know me, what I call my alacrity is my mysterious ability to do things around 20 percent faster than people think is possible.

Example : when I first started working for my uncle Sonny, my immediate boss, Blaine Skerry (RIP, Blaine), showed me the filing system for the movies we rented out, and pointed me at a huge stack of returns and told me to file them away.

About ten minutes later, I emerged from the back room and told him I was done.

He blinked at me in disbelief and said “You can’t possibly be done already. ”

I shrugged and said, “See for yourself. ”

So we both go to the back room, and he sees that the stack is gone. He then looks all around the back room, presumably on the theory that I might have hidden the stack somewhere as either a practical joke or a rather odd attempt to shirk work.

He even looked for some of the tapes he knew had been in the stack.

I wasn’t offended by any of this because, well, I am used to that kind of thing, I got it from my teachers all the time as a kid.

If anything, I was impressed by the orderly and thorough nature of his investigation.

Before long, though, he had to admit that yup, I had done it that fast.

That was not the first time I had left him shaking his head in disbelief, and it sure as heck wasn’t the last.

You get the idea. I do some things very fast, faster than people think is possible. It’s just one of my magical abilities, and while it doesn’t seem to me like I am working at some kind of superhuman rate, I have wondered how it is that I do it.

So here’s my theories. I think it boils down to one or more of these factors :

1. Intelligence. This is one is quite simple. I have a high IQ, and that means that I think fast. Most tasks involve some degree of thinking, so it follows that I would do those parts faster than others, and hence do the tasks faster than people expect. This is surely a factor in my alacrity, but is not enough on its own to explain the sort of results I get.
2. Focus. Part of being such a deep focus kind of person (as opposed to being a multitasker) is that I am able to completely focus on the task at hand. That means that all my energies go into getting the job done and my energies are considerable and this propels me to higher speeds than people who are more scattered.
3. Optimization. I inherently optimize any task I am doing. This is true of everybody, but I seem to have a mind built to optimize and so I do it faster and better than others. Hence, my way of doing things quickly sheds all unncessary steps and motions in order to maximize performance.
4. Task competitiveness. Or something like that. From the very beginning, I have liked to show off how bright I am by doing things faster than the other kids. Imagine me doing my schoolwork in elementary school in one tenth of the time it took the rest and you get the idea. I never did it with the conscious intent of showing off, but I have to admit, I did enjoy that aspect of it.
5. Impatience. General, these tasks I excel at are not particularly fun, and I want to be done as soon as possible.

All that combines into what I call my alacrity, and it’s one of the ways in which I am a wizard with magical powers.

Not in a literal sense, of course. I am a strict rational materialist and that does not allow for a belief in magic in the ordinary, fair tale sense of the word.

But I do things people think are impossible, and that gives me somewhat of the aura of a wizard or a miracle worker.

Now we must (or at least, I must) ask : what effect does this have on how I am perceived? What are the social consequences of this tendency of mine?

My first line, flippant answer is that I don’t know because to me it is normal and so I have never taken it very seriously. I mean, I know it’s weird and semi-magical, but like the rest of the ways in which I am extraordinary, it has never really been worked into my self image and so I have treated it casually and not really been paying attention to how it impacts others.

I just do like I do, ya know what I mean?

But now that I am thinking about it and trying to imagine what it is like to experience it from the point of view of your average citizen, I can’t help but wonder how they see it.

I am pretty sure it just weirds them out some. The problem is that I don’t give the proper signals about it. The default mode of the human mind expects people with extraordinary abilities to be proud and maybe even a bit arrogant and pushy.

It expects them to act dominant, in other words. At the very least, it expects them to act like they know what they are doing is extraordinary.

But I never have. Not really. If someone said, “That’s amazing!”. I would be pleased and I would thank them, but otherwise, I act exactly as if the thing I just did was normal.

Because for me, it is.

And I think that could leave people feeling a bit alienated. Like I just levitated a heavy object and they were astounded and I was all, “Oh, right. I can move objects with my mind. Now where should we go for lunch?”.

So once more, I reach the same old conclusion : I might actually get along better with others if I acted more arrogant and superior because then I would be sending out signals consistent with my abilities.

I don’t want to do it. I would rather just get on with things. I am the sort of person who prefers to let his actions speak for themselves. The very idea of being actively smug and self-promotional makes me feel ill.

But there has to be some middle ground where I can acknowledge that I am amazing in a way that is reassuring to others while also being acceptable to myself.

One thing I know for sure : I will not pretend to be less than I am in order to fit in.

For better and for worse, that is not an option for me. No dice.

So I guess I will have to go arouind telling people I’m a wizard.

That way, they will at least expect me to do magicla things.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.