OKAY BUT THIS IS SO IMPORTANT.  I’m analytically highly intelligent.  I’m not just bragging here, I have a point, but first you have to understand that I’m pretty smart.  Smart enough that socializing is difficult because I have a lot of difficulty understanding how other people process the world (also it turns out that people get angry when you admit that you’re psychoanalyzing them so that you know what to say, which is pretty much how I interact with humanity).  Like, I walked into the SAT severely concussed with no preparation and scored a 2190 out of 2400, and I got a perfect 800 on the Critical Reading section (notoriously near-impossible to ace), but I was born without that road map for how to be an Earthling.

So I’m not good with people, they make me uneasy, and I had to learn how to do the society thing mostly by rote memorization–this makes people angry, this makes them happy, and it makes them cruel when I admit that I can learn languages at ridiculous paces and do number theory in my head and read four hundred pages in an hour.  (Yeah, also?  Don’t tell people they’re being arrogant and condescending unless you’re being as polite as possible, because they might be trying really hard, and that shit hurts after a while.)  My mom?  She’s great with people.  Don’t get me wrong, she’s a total introvert who basically comes home and rants about the idiots at her job, but she is flat-out brilliant at handling them.  So she can’t keep up with me when I go on a tirade about how nice the Fibonacci sequence is or when I sit down and recite whole blocks of text–who gives a fuck?  She’s brilliant.  She’s a genius.  She can talk to someone for ten minutes and be able to make them sign over their soul with a smile–I might be able to charm someone because I had to learn it to survive (no one likes someone who thinks everyone should be able to keep up), but I have nothing like her talent.

So this is an alternative genius appreciation post.  Also an appreciation of Moran’s mom post, because she’s awesome.