This is all Lev Grossman's fault.

Edit - GUYS. GUYS. I'm so fucking good. Or at least I used to be:
              "So what is needed, essentially, is nuclear power that doesn’t cost an infeasible amount (read: an arm and a leg), that doesn’t produce dangerously radioactive waste (read: an extra arm and a leg?), and doesn’t result in weapons proliferation (read: extra arms for everyone!)"
          .....you mean you guys don't read copies of your old fuck-around essays from years back?

Fine, you fuckers don't like rambling, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing rants about video games you haven't played?

FINE.

Let's have rambling, egocentric, maniacal screeds delivered in the manner of the drunk shouting his manifestos into the ears of those around him who are only trying to have a good time.

You scum.

Cue audio!

Sure, sure, I am your typical young adult up in arms against The Man (oh god, I had to separate those words. I am no longer "young adult", I am a legit Young Adult. By which I mean a decrepit, lecherous old man. Lock me away in a home so I can rot without today's youth having to look at me and be reminded of their own mortality. I am dust.) but I am also quite often completely respectful to actual authority.
Proper, earned authority. I was a little fucker when I was a kid because I thought I was better than everyone else. Smarter, probably. I don't know.
Early school is about 25% learning academic material, and 75% other shit.
How to deal with your peers.
Familiarizing yourself with the concept of stupid people having power over you.

My mom keeps things like report cards and childhood intelligence tests (from back before the Internet, so you know they're legitimate). There are two recurring phrases - the first one is "gifted", so, you know, suck my dicksmarts. The second is more varied. Sometimes it's the solid "does not get along well with others", other times it's just a (-) grade in the "social" category of those massive elementary grade sheets. My favorite is the personal note sent home from school that throws around my "lack of tolerance for my peers" (no shit, asshole - they 're stupid!)...

But my goal is not to defiantly justify childhood behavior, because mostly I was a cock.
We were all horrible cocks. Children are just fucking awful. Let's never do that again.

So. I was talking about my respect for legitimate authority.

This is due to my upbringing, which was due to my parents upbringing. That is how this works.

I am only managing to piece this all together now, thanks to recently having been forced to take a long sobering look at myself as a...product. As a process? As a person! That's the one.

Probably because I thought I was such hot shit in the brain department. That's the source of the original shaping of my mind.
I was told I was smart, and so I learned that being smart was good.
Was the best thing.
If I was excellent at sports or something, I probably would have been encouraged to develop muscles or...sportsmanlike behavior or team....coordination....sportsball....points.
As a parent, you're just sort of constantly on the lookout for things your child could potentially be good at and once you've found something you just sort of gently prod your kid with it until it latches on or they decide they don't actually want to play the piano, mom, thanks.
(If you grow up in asia, the second option is replaced with a second helping of the first option.)

Oh right. We were talking about respect.

My fascination stems from my lack of complete understanding exactly as to what respect is supposed to be, I guess.
Excuse me while I dictionary it.

Okay yeah I remember what it was like to be a teenager again.
It's even in the fucking definition!
"A feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements."
So when people spewed stuff like "Show some respect for your elders!" or tried to use "respect" and "authority" together, I was confused! Those people hadn't done shit for me in the respect department - in fact, they were obviously lacking in the abilities, qualities, and achievements category!

Mostly because the only thing I respected was smarts - more specifically, the smarts they told me I was good at. This is a selfish and childish view of the world, so it's a good thing I was a selfish child at the time.
Shit like doing math really fast, or knowing the periodic table a few rows down. Pointless trivial "smartsy" stuff that we were rewarded for doing in our early school career in the hopes that it would point us towards actually fucking learning something.
Except we were braindead children! Shih-tzus! All we could see was the finger, desperately pointing at something delicious but far away that we were incapable of thinking about!
This metaphor has exceeded its utility!

Which is why nowadays I have a legitimate reverence for people who are more intellectual than I am, even if they aren't particularly better people - a fact that I'm capable of noticing now, which adds a pleasantly annoying element of cognitive dissonance that I can prod like a sore tooth when I need to.

Things like having a PhD or being fluent in multiple languages or understanding fluid dynamics automatically elevates you into this strange, elven superior plane of existence.
You have earned my undying respect by unwittingly jumping through the only hoop I hold.
And that's absurd, and inaccurate!
But it's an explainable byproduct of the way my brain was built by myself and others.


This is the reason I have to work in the sciences.

It's also the reason I don't care where I work in the sciences (to a certain extent).

This is, when you stop and think about it, a serious fucking issue.

I'm in science for the wrong goddamn reasons. I was drawn to it because people go "Ooh!" when you're eight years old and you tell them you like chemistry and physics.
And I genuinely did, don't get me wrong. I still do!
There is legitimacy to my motivations now that I'm a grown ass human being; an earnest interest that I have had to manually scrape together (which is as it should be, now that I reflect on it).
But the notion of free will and the ability to just decide to be whatever you want to be when you grow up is demonstrably false. You're being defined, refined, specified, from day one.

*the author then proceeds to scrap this post for 2.5 weeks but I'll be damned if I'm erasing something that took an ounce of actual effort to produce, even if it's poop. In this metaphor, the words above are literally poop that I forcefully delivered to your doorstop. This is a poop metaphor. This is a poor metaphor. *

There are two other things I admire besides smarts.
One of them is skill. This is different than grace, but barely.
That was the thing that made me really drop the book and stare at the wall (the most) about the way Pullman drew together His Dark Materials.
Used to read it with grace. Now you're going to have to learn to cultivate skill.

Story of my fucking life.

Thirdly is talent. This is integrated into the other two, to be sure, but it's worth separating.
You can teach yourself to Art. Well. Feynman did it and he was already a goddamn Nobel laureate by the time he buckled down and had an exhibition of his paintings.
I'm willing to believe you're capable of learning just about anything, given enough time and dedication and nothing nothing nothing else going on.
This is where the shared belief among men arises from - the thought that, if we lost/gave up everything and moved to a Shaolin monastery for the next restofourlife, we could become a grand master badass. If we Jason Bourne'd ourselves for ten years, we could take down a small country.
This is a necessary lie we tell ourselves, often directly after being rejected by women.
But I do believe there's some truth to it, anyway.

The point is talent is like....a "rare candy" you get to use to cut some of the grueling dedication out of mastery.
You get a completely random amount/distribution of talent and its up to you to do anything with it.
This arbitrary resource is way more apparent in some people, or they were just lucky enough to find something they were good at quicker than the rest of us, and that's worth respect.

Or, rather, admiration. Man, I really don't like the word "respect."