Remembering that time early in elementary school, after I’d gotten kicked out of three preschools and asked not to come back to kindergarten, and I was totally not having it with my teacher that year, who was new and did not earn respect

And my father was solicitor for the school district so he knew what levers to pull to get me checked out for a “Gifted” program that I don’t think had existed at that young a level yet

And I remember, in this supply closet, this guy first giving me the ruler-drop test (you hold a ruler between their open fingers and tell them to grab it when you drop, then check where they grabbed to see how far it fell before they did, it works cause reaction time solidly correlates to g, the thing IQ is a measure of like inches are a measure of length)

And then weeks later one where I had a bunch of wooden cubes with red, bare, black, diagonal red/bare, red/black and bare/black sides and had to use them to replicate diagrams in timed tests

Then another “what’s wrong with this drawing” open-ended one, I remember I got one of a boy looking at a stand-up mirror and didn’t see any issues, after the test I asked and he said there should’ve been a reflection, I said given the way the angles were posed and that the mirror had diagonal lines indicating it as a polished surface we just weren’t seeing it from that position.

(I got tested again twice in later years with Raven’s Progressive Matrices)

Anyway, again cause I guess my dad was hooked in the guy personally came to our house to discuss the results and my parents sent me upstairs but I put my ear to the floor vent and heard him say “not only is your son the smartest kid in his grade, he’s the smartest kid in the district, and statistically one of the five smartest people in the state”

And that memory has had a different place in my mind over the years, and the place it has right now is “you know, at that point Taylor Swift was also alive in Pennsylvania”