When Did I Get Dumb?

It wasn't always like this. I distinctly remember teaching Andrea Tucillo and Tim Fenton (people I generally thought of as smarter than I was) everything we were supposed to have learned by doing our AP Chemistry homework everyday before class started. But maybe that was it. Because now I almost exclusively feel like I do not and more importantly, cannot, see things the way other people do. Which I realize, put under another light, sounds like a positive. But it isn't.

It's not as if I've somehow lost whatever intelligence I might have had. I didn't hit my head or anything. (Actually, the first time I went curling, I did fall and go unconscious, and I still don't remember it, so maybe this is a traceable event.) And while excessive amounts of television is almost certainly serving to atrophe every other part of my body, I don't believe it can make you dumber.

So why does everyone seem smarter all of a sudden? I never felt smart, really, not even during those probably misleading minutes before AP Chemistry, but I never felt dumb either. My mother suggested something about going back to school for something (anything) recently and that sounded like the worst idea in the history of forever. I couldn't even envision it, it sounded so horrible.

Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea feels like it's written in another language. One I might have taken a semester of fourteen years ago but obviously didn't pay attention to.

Anyone who uses an unusual word seems pretentious, which was always the case, I guess, but now I'm starting to feel like thinking that way is, and maybe always was, just a defense mechanism preventing me from having to understand them.

And, of course, most telling of all, I can't manage to type something here everyday. Mostly because everything I can think of seems like the most boring series of words ever strung together.

At least I can understand them.