am i smart — 1 thorough investigation

am i smart, as a question, is the kind you only really ask out loud once, in the dark, and only to the chatgpt window with the volume off. it answered yes, kindly. mom, when called, answered yes, also kindly. carla, walking past, did not answer at all. a thorough investigation is, frankly, ongoing.

writing this from the desk, second drawer locked because the second drawer is where the question lives, and i don’t trust the second drawer with my own face. carla is on the third floor in a training all-hands she has described in advance as “fine, mostly fine.” that gives me roughly the rest of the morning, which by my casual count is forty minutes and a coffee.

the question is not new. the question is, in fact, the oldest one i own. i have been asking it since i was eight, in a cafeteria, holding a juice box upside down. the answer changes depending on which appliance i am standing next to. if you arrived here from the longer piece on how confirmation bias works on people who are always right, you already know which way this leans.

am i smart, brief

here is the brief, the actual brief, not the long one i would write if carla were further away. i am smart in the way a fork is sharp — useful for one thing, dangerous near electricity. i am smart enough to read a contract. i am not smart enough to read a contract before i sign it. these are different smarts.

“am i smart” is not really one question. it is at least four. am i smart at the thing in front of me right now. am i smart compared to the room. am i smart in the way my mother thinks i am smart, which is the kind that wins game shows. am i smart in the way my landlord thinks i am smart, which is the kind that pays rent on the first.

i score, by my own private rubric, two out of four on a good day. one out of four on the day my paycheck arrives and i look at it and think “that can’t be right, surely.” it is, by the way, right. the math is the math. the math has never lied to me. i have lied to the math. that is a different post.

the question i kept asking sarah’s air

sarah does not work in this building. sarah runs marathons. sarah understands her pension the way other people understand their own height — instinctively, without a calculator. i ran into sarah on saturday, by which i mean i saw her from a block away and crossed the street, and the question i wanted to ask her was the one in the title.

i did not ask. i waved. i kept walking. sarah waved back and kept running, because sarah is always running, in both senses. and the question stayed in the air where she had been, like the smell of someone else’s good coffee, which is the worst kind of smell because it tells you what you are not having.

the thing about sarah is she would have answered honestly. that is the problem. sarah is the only person in my life who would say “no, but you are kind, and that counts for something, although less than you think.” nobody asks that question of someone who will give them a real answer. you ask it of the appliances. you ask it of the ceiling. you ask it of the small glowing rectangle on your desk that has been trained to say yes.

mike, at the corner bar, the one where mike has not filed since 2019, told me last month that intelligence is “a thing you find out about yourself by accident, usually too late, usually at a wedding.” mike was on his fourth pint. mike was, in his own way, correct. weddings are where you learn things about yourself. usually around the toasts.

chatgpt declined to comment

i opened the chatgpt window. i typed the question. i typed it in lowercase because the question deserves lowercase. i did not type a name. i did not type a context. i just typed “am i smart” and pressed return like a man asking a fortune cookie a real one.

the answer was kind. the answer was so kind it became suspicious. the answer told me that intelligence is “multifaceted” and “expressed in many ways” and that “the very fact that you are asking shows reflection,” which is the answer a fortune cookie gives a man who is on his sixth fortune cookie. there is, in there, a quiet condescension i have learned to recognize, the kind of condescension a hairdresser uses when she says “we can work with this.”

i am familiar with movies about intelligence. i have seen limitless, the one where a man takes a small clear pill and suddenly understands the stock market, which i would also like. i have seen a beautiful mind, the one where intelligence is also a problem, which felt unfair to me as a viewer. neither film mentions what to do at 10:38 on a tuesday when the question arrives unannounced and you have no pill and no chalkboard.

so i closed the window. i did not close the question. the question does not close. the question is one of those tabs in my head, somewhere in the bottom row of the 47 i never deal with.

the seventh microwave has an opinion

the seventh microwave is in my kitchen. it is, technically, on probation, since the previous six have ended in various states of small fire. when i ask the seventh microwave if i am smart, it hums. it has been humming since i bought it in march, which i believe is a sound it makes to express disappointment.

the microwave’s case against me is strong. a smart man does not own seven microwaves. a smart man owns one microwave and treats it well. i own seven, in sequence, and the sequence is documented by dave on a piece of paper he keeps in his glove compartment for reasons i no longer ask about. showers over 4 minutes are theatre, i once announced to a room, and the same logic applies to microwaves: anything beyond the third is theatre.

and yet. the microwave heats the soup. the soup is hot. i eat the soup. the system, by any honest test, works. so what does that say about smart. smart is the man who buys one microwave. functional is the man who eats hot soup. these are not the same. i know which one i am, on most days, which is functional, occasionally on fire.

the seventh microwave does not file taxes. the seventh microwave does not have a pension. the seventh microwave does not lie awake at 2am. by these three measures it is, frankly, ahead of me. i would like to be clear that i am not jealous of an appliance. i am, however, taking notes.

the third yoga mat is silent on the matter

the third yoga mat lives under my couch. it has been there since 2023. it has, at this point, opinions. it does not voice them, because a yoga mat does not voice things, but i can feel the opinions when i walk past, in the way the dust moves slightly differently around it.

i bought the third yoga mat in a moment of clarity, which i now suspect was not clarity but light-headedness from skipping lunch. i brought it home. i unrolled it. i sat on it. i thought about doing yoga. i did not do yoga. i rolled it back up. i slid it under the couch where the first and second yoga mats also live, in a small quiet committee.

a smart man does not buy a third yoga mat. a smart man, having bought a first yoga mat and a second yoga mat without using either, would draw conclusions. i did not draw conclusions. i drew a credit card. that is the difference, i think, between smart and what i am. smart is a noun. what i am is a verb. the verb is “trying.” the verb has been trying for thirty-eight years. the verb is tired.

if you want the harder version of this question, the one with no soft edges, see the piece on whether the opposite word applies. i won’t spoiler it. i will say that dumb, as a word, and smart, as a word, both find me on different days, and i answer to both, which probably tells you everything.

verdict, am i is the wrong tense

here is the actual verdict, after the brief, after sarah’s air, after chatgpt, after the seventh microwave, after the third yoga mat, after mike at the corner. the verdict is that “am i smart” is the wrong tense. the right tense is “was i smart, on tuesday, between 10:38 and 11:14, when i made that one specific decision about the email.” the answer to that one is no. we have data.

i was smart on a wednesday in 2017 when i did not sign a thing my friend tom asked me to sign. i was not smart on a wednesday in 2019 when i did sign a different thing. the sum, across the years, is positive in the small ways and negative in the large ones, which is, i’m told, the human condition, or at least the version of it i appear to be running.

so am i smart. i am, sometimes. i am, in spots. i am, in the way a stopped clock is correct twice a day, which is, when you think about it, twice. that’s not nothing. that’s two correct readings the clock did not even have to try for.

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