I had a quiet day working from home, then in the evening I went to a fish fry with two neighbors. We sat outside, and one neighbor asked what we had wanted to be when we were little. She had wanted to be a marine biologist, and I had wanted to be a lepidopterist. Our other neighbor claimed she couldn't remember, and she couldn't remember her favorite Halloween costume either. My one neighbor and I were puzzled by that; she is a little older than we are, so is that what happens when you reach four score years of age? You can't remember anything from your childhood?
This got me thinking about a conversation I had with someone (Kathbert?) about being child prodigies, and this person said I must have been a bit of one. I said come on, I'm nothing but a low-level public servant, and the other person said child prodigies rarely go on to set the world on fire. I remember reading about someone who had one of the highest IQs ever recorded, and he floundered for a while, but now he's apparently very happy being a nightclub bouncer, and living with his wife on a hobby farm, raising all sorts of animals. I thought, yeah, me too - not a worldly success, but very happy. So tonight it hit me: if you were a child who read very early and used big words, adults were always dumping more on you. "Here, read this book you have no interest in just to prove how smart you are!" "Here, solve this puzzle to prove how smart you are!" "Here, take this class way above your grade level to prove how smart you are!" You start to feel like a trained monkey in the circus. Then one day you realize you don't have to do everything people tell you to, and so maybe you're not wildly successful, but you're so happy - you're a wild monkey, swinging on a vine and eating a banana you picked yourself. Maybe you don't know where your next banana is coming from, unlike in the circus, but half the fun is finding it.
This made me laugh way too hard:
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