Don't wanna feel like stupid people

[andrewducker]

I've spent the last week and a half feeling stupid. Literally.

I've been able to have most conversations on auto-pilot, but any kind of original or systematic thought has gone out of the window. I've had a a discussion with Heron regarding communism where I knew there were things I was missing, but I just couldn't see what. I've had discussions about abortion and couldn't see where I was going wrong. I staggered to the bathroom last night wondering if stupid people felt this way all the time, or if stupid people can't tell that they're stupid and so don't notice.

It certainly gives you a lot of empathy for people who tell you that "X is dull" or "I don't read" or "I avoid politics" because for the last week I've lived on a diet of cartoons and staring into the distance while dribbling slightly. Anything more complex than Samurai Jack left me feeling lost, confused and wanting to crawl back under the duvet. If that's how most people feel when they encounter politics/philosophy/science no wonder the majority of people have no interest in them.

Today I've solved 3 problems that I'd been completely unable to solve since last Wednesday and I feel more alive than I have since Adam cruelly infected me.

I still don't feel entirely up to scratch (hopefully by the weekend - as it is my coughing stopped me getting more than 6 hours sleep last night), but I do feel like life is worth living again.

Comments

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my world.
To get any valid work done I have to stare at the problem for 20 minutes as my mind paddles on air before I finally figure out what I have to do. If the problems vaguely hard it takes me days to come to conclusions that are fairly obvious.
Most of the time I can't see stuff the way I'm sure I used to be able to.

[andrewducker]

I'm pretty sure you _are_ smart.

I mean, you're the guy whoe writes the AI for Lionhead, you must be.

I seem to recall you've been published and everything!

[drainboy.livejournal.com]

But nothing is obvious, nothing flows, I feel like thinking is an uphill struggle that my body actively avoids. My ability for recall is rubbish, my attention span non-existent. The actual part of me able to carry out original thought is reasonable but slow beyond slow. Most of the time I don't feel like my neurons fire activation through axons and dendrites, I feel like they fire them through the world's most viscous honey.

Can you be smart _and_ slow.

Maybe I'm that.

[andrewducker]

You could well be. Should I point out that most of the time I let sit in the background for months and percolate before it comes to the surface? That I seem to have things at my fingertips specifically because I immerse myself in as much information as possible so that I've got vast resources to call on when I need to know something? I spend hours every day reading news sites and keeping up to date with what's going on in the tech world so that when people mention the new wave of NVidia graphics cards I can say that they seem to have lost their crown to ATI and despite the fact that they've ostensibly produced a DX9 card for $70, the performance is in fact lower than their older DX8 cards. Or that the US war in Iraq was obviously not about WMD but was in fact the beginning of a process of change for the Middle East to increase democracy so that there aren't poor Arab's furious at the state of their countries flying planes into American buildings.

Apparently it takes 10 years to become an expert in almost any subject - I'm trying to become a semi-experty in as many as I can manage :->

[tisme.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way. *sad*