Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: EQ

Keeping it to myself, part three

I want to be clear. When I talk about knowing I’m intelligent and wishing I could mention it without being a jerk, I don’t mean I want to be able to go around bleating about it willy-nilly. Just when it has relevance and in a thoughtful way. It’s not as if I want to rub everyone’s face into the fact that I’m soooooo smart. But, I don’t understand why it’s verboten to talk about it–or being empathetic. Here is the post from yesterday.

I’ve said this several times, and maybe it’s apocryphal at this point. I am a huge Poirot fan (which is not apocryphal). He is a pompuous, arrogant Belgian (NOT French) man who is not averse to tooting his own horn. In one of the novels, he is saying how great he is while Captain Hastings is dying in very British embarrasment next to him. Hastings says something about how Poirot should not say tihngs like that. Poirot says (paraphrasing), “If I met someone else with the abilities that I have, I would be impressed and say how great they are. Why should I hide it when it’s me?”

Again, that’s paraphrasing and I’m no longer sure it’s something I’ve actually read. Meaning, it could be something I have retconned into existence. But it’s something that Poirot would say, so I stand biy it. Meaning, he had no qualms about talking of his intelligence, though he preferred when Hastings bigged him up rather than when he had to do it himself. What else was a lapdog for? (He’s said things similar to that, too.)

I thought about that long and hard because I was raised to believe that saying anything positive about yourself was not only verboten, but blasphemous and rude. It’s Taiwanese culture in general, but especially for women/girls. Add to that the deeply misogynistic church we belonged to, and, well, it took forever before I could see anything positive about myself, let alone say it out loud.

I am better about it now. Dying (twice) really helped with that. It stripped away a lot of the bullshit that I had grown up with. Unfortunately, some of it has come back because I still live in this world and not some ideal one. But, I know my worth now. I know that  I have worth, which is something I could not have said before my medical crisis. Not with any confidence, anyway. When I came back from the dead (twice), it was as if all the filters had been stripped away.


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Keeping it to myself, part two

I’m writing about being a weirdo and how I mask it on the daily. Here is yesterday’s post about how I pretty much keep my trap shut about, well, almost everything. In particular, about intelligence/empathy.

I was trying to tease out why people react so negatively about someone plainly saying they were intelligent/empathetic in a way they wouldn’t with someone who says they are very good at basketball/playing piano, etc. I was saying because the ability to do something is more concrete and measurable, but I think it’s also because…how do I say this?

OK. I’m just going to muse it out as I write.

Everyone has a brain of varying function. I don’t think that’s too controversial to say. But, almost everyone has mobility to a certain extent, too. We can talk about the latter (thoughtfully), but there doesn’t seem a way to talk about the former. I have seen people try to talk about their intelligence in forums while qualifying it every way left of Sunday, and people still jumped on them.

“Oh, you think you’re so smart, do you??”

“There’s someone smarter than you!”

“You’re not the smartest person in the room.”

I’m paraphrasing, but this was in response to someone carefully saying they were oftentimes ahead of other people in figuring things out (in a work blog). The commenter was judicious about what he was saying, extremely so. So many qualifiers about with the gist being that he worked twice as fast as other people and had to find ways to talk to them so they could understand what he was saying.

I nodded my head sympathetically as  Iwas reading. I thought he had put it very carefully and underplayed it as much as he could and still get his point across. But it wasn’t enough for most commenters and there were several angry comments chastizing him for saying anything at all. This was on a blog that skews progressive, which I think is actally part of the problem. There’s been a push in that demographic to downplay anything intelligence-related, including college. Again, I’m talking mostly about the Ask A Manager website. I’ve noticed in the last few years, there’s been an uptick in saying college is overrated. But, at the same time, everyone saying this has gone to college. I find the disconnect amusing, quite frankly.

The other one I find funny is how people will say very loudly that nepotism is bad! But, if they tell a colleague about their (the commenter’s) kid’s job search, that’s completely different! WHich falls into this post quite nicely, actually.


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Keeping it to myself

The last time I talked to K, we had a very frank talk about things we didn’t say in the gen pop. Nothing nasty or gross, but things that we knew most people would not understand. I have told this story many times, but I’ll tell it again to make my point.

A few decades ago, I was really into buying things on eBay. I was also very into Alan Rickman. I bought a bunch of paraphernalia and media that featured him, and one of the items was a videotape (yes, it was that long ago) of him in a Broadway production. The description said that it was not pirated, which made me think it was a theater-approved videotape. When I received it, it was a personally-recorded video of the performance. I immediately contacted the seller and said that it was pirated. She wrote back saying it was a genuine copy because her husband had videotaped it.

Nowadays, I would have just notified eBay and pointed out that this was against their policies. Back then, I naively thought I could explain to her why she was wrong. We went back and forth a few times before she contacted eBay to complain about me. When I explained the situation, they immediately refunded my money. The seller gave me a negative rating so I did the same in return.

I mentioned it to my therapist because it really bothered me. I told her (my therapist) how I was frustrated because I could not find the right way to explain to the seller and was taken by surprise when I got the notification that she had reported me. My therapist said to me (paraphrasing), “Minna. You talk on a level six whereas others talk on a level two or three. It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of need. You’re at the self-actualization level whereas they are worrying about physiological needs or safety.”

She also said to me at a separate time but on a related point, using the Senate as an example in relation to IQ. She said that the average IQ was 100. In the Senate, that means that half of them are over 100 and half are under. Her point was that I was in the top 5% or so, which meant that I was ‘above’ most people in the gen pop. That’s when she mentioned the second conclusion of the Dunning-Kruger study–that people who are much better at something than other people drastically underestimate how much better they are.


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Off-the-charts EQ

In the last post, I talked about the secret to small talk. It’s pretty simple–listen to what the other person is saying and build on it. I say it’s simple, but it’s much more difficult to execute effectively, apparently. I say apparently because it’s second nature to me by now, but other people act as if it’s a completely foreign idea.

This is also a great way to make it seem like you’re interested in a person when you’re not. In otherwords, coworkers or other guests at a party. I’m an introvert. I do not like being around a lot of other people. Talking about THEM is a way to put me at ease because the focus is off me.

I don’t know when I realized that people were desperate to talk about themselves. For someone who would truly listen to them. Not wait for their turn to speak, barely paying attention to what was being said. But actually listening. With all of their attention.

When I was in college, I had a female friend who complained to me that all the guys liked me. There were a ton of things wrong with me back in those days, but one asset I had then is one I still have now. “It’s because I treat them like human beings,” I told her. This is the same friend who, when she had a crush on a guy, memorized his class schedule and made sure to be outside each class after it was over so she could ‘accidentally’ run into him.

I was so snotty back then, and I was very invested in being a ‘cool girl’. I looked down on the other women for being into frivolous things like makeup and clothes, but I didn’t realize that my tenuous place in the boys’ club was predicated on me acting like them. If I dared to slip and be ‘feminine’, I would have quickly been kicked out of the club.

Which, well, that’s messed up in all kinds of way. I had no interest  in typically feminine things, but I shouldn’t have felt pressured to look down on them, either. There’s nothing wrong with caring about those things. On the third hand, though, there’s no reason for them to look down on me as well for not liking those things.

Resists impulse to go into a thousand-word screed about performative gender roles.

This is one of the reasons I started questioning my gender, damn it! I have been told I’m not a real woman for: not wanting children, not caring about makeup or fashion, liking sex, imagining having sex with strangers, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.


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Reading people for filth

I’m good at reading people. Not in the current vernacular and how I put it in the title (though I can do that as well. I just mostly keep it to myself), but in knowing them better than they know themselves. Back when I actually worked around people, I was able to tell when they were pregnant before they revealed it to other people. My best friend, too. We were at a bar, and I just blurted out that she was pregnant. She dismissed me because even though she and her husband were trying, it hadn’t been very long. I was right, however, and I was right about the birth gender. Oh, that’s the other part. I can say the birth gender about the baby as well. I have been wrong once out of a dozen times. And in that case, that person is now questioning their gender.

I was also able to call certain sports moments, too. Like the 12th inning of the BoSox, er, Yankees I think post-season game. When Big Papi stepped up to the home plate, I suddenly knew he was going to hit a homerun. I said it out loud to my mother, and then he did it. I also knew he was going to win the next game, though not how. My mom has joked that I could make a killing if I bet on games, but it doesn’t work that way. It only happens in the moment. Like, we were at a local tennis match and I automatically said, “Double fault” as the person served. It was a double fault. My mother demanded I do it again, but it wasn’t a conscious thought on my part.

I called that my party trick because while it’s amusing, it has no practical usage. And, that’s not really reading people, well, the sports part isn’t. That’s predicting the future. The pregnant part, though, is reading the person without meaning to. I don’t intend to figure out if someone is pregnant or not–it just happens. When I worked at the county, there was a woman I worked with. I looked at her and knew she was pregnant with a boy. I did not tell her, of course, because that would be creepy and weird. I left that job because it was always temporary, but my mother worked there. Two or three months later, she told everyone at work that she was pregnant–with a boy. My mother told me, and I was glad to have my confirmation.

My brother is having the time of his life living his teenage years. He never got to really date around so he’s doing that now. He dropped by last night to talk about it. He called me his therapist. Funnily, it doesn’t bother me when he does it the way it does when my mother does. It’s because he’s done so much for me. I can never repay the lengths he went to when I was in the hospital. When I tried to thank him for it, he shrugged and said, “We’re family. It’s what we do.” Which, yes, it is. However, not everyone does it so well and with nary a complaint. So if he wants advice while he chews over his dating life, I’m here for him!


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