I award you no points

Apparently there are two ways to get dumber (three, if you count excessive drinking). We all know about the effects of being in the presence of a moron or morons. The line from Billy Madison, "Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it," is funny because it's true. If you're in the upper half of the IQ distribution, you've probably had at least one conversation with someone in the lower half that left you wondering, "what did we just talk about," or "now where do I live again?" I had a couple of "conversations" with Ohio State fans in Tempe that would have forced me to repeat a grade if I was still in school. And I'll never forget the kid we called Bear in college, who would enter the room and proclaim, in his Waco, TX drawl, "Ah just reelized the red blinking laght on the phone meens yoo have voice mail." At which point I would glance at whoever else was in the room, usually Kuder, and say "are you dumber?" "Yep, I'm dumber."

The other way to get dumber, as I was made aware today, is to talk to someone smarter than you. Now, I don't consider myself any smarter or less smart than any of my friends; rather, I tend to make shit up using big words. The case in point is when I was discussing this blog (a surefire way to get dumber under reason #1) and whether I should make a post explaining why I chose the links at the right of the page. I was concerned that doing so would cross the line into self-referential metablogging -- a phrase I obviously coined on the spot. Robert (name changed to protect the innocent) did a verbal double-take at "self-referential metablogging" and said he gets dumber every time I talk to him the phone. If that is truly the case, then pity poor Robert! It's one thing to have a conversation with an Einstein or a Hawking and realize that they're just on a level that you will never even comprehend. In those situations, you just have to hope they'll appreciate that intellectual chasm and communicate to you a glimpse of a higher truth or point of view. But the 99% of us who aren't supergeniuses don't have to feel dumber around each other! Instead, when we encounter someone who won't make us dumber (usually identified by their scarlet and gray colors), we should strive to get smarter! If Robert felt dumb when I made that blog comment, it was no dumber than I felt when in the same conversation he tried to tell me about some kind of fish that puffs up (evidently called a beta fish) that I've never heard of. Isn't it great that we both learned something from each other? Conversations like that restore my faith in society, the downfall of which is accelerated every day by poor driving and truly dumb questions that honestly make me wonder if some people never progressed beyond "The Puppy Who Lost His Way".