Yes. Gray stuff, or what is more commonly thought of as brain matter. The stuff that makes us humans smarter than the run-of-the-mill members of God's creation. Gray stuff, a.k.a. intelligence. So I'm thinking about this lately, for some reason. What is intelligence, after all? How do we measure it, and how do we know that what we measure actually is intelligence? And isn't it just a bit overrated? Probably. But ...
I have to admit, I am an intelligence snob of sorts. I'd like to think that I'm intelligent, and certainly enjoy rubbing shoulders with people I think of as being highly intelligent...and probably hope they might think likewise of me in return. That I even spend any energy at all thinking about this--and obviously more often than I ought to (I mean, why am I writing about this, you know?)--only underscores the fact that either I'm not really as intelligent as I'd like to think, that I am overly-concerned that I come across to other people as being "intelligent", or that I have no (or really low) self-esteem.
The vanilla answer is that it's probably some combination of all the above. (Well duh!) No doubt a healthy dose of reality--if I could ever figure out *what* reality is--would be a good thing, and keep me from basking under self-deceptive illusions.
But the self-deception is so ... comfortable.
So I guess I'm an intelligence snob. Not necessarily proud of it, but at least willing to admit it--mostly because stupid people make me want to beat my head against the nearest hard surface. I get headaches easily enough as it is.
And don't ask me what inspired this, because I'm sure I don't know. I'm not sure "inspired" is the right word for it either. But we can debate what constitutes "inspiration" some other time.
