Cooks, Books, and Mensa

Good morning - it's funny where your mind takes you when you have nothing else to guide you.

I've been writing a bit about the night, and how frustrating it is to not be able to sleep, and to be alone just with sleeplessness and worry. So there's something about the lighted daytime that alleviates that feeling. Otherwise more people would dread being awake, though some people probably already do.

Here's some things to do:

Madly clean house

Creatively bake cookies while lacking the proper ingredients (cocoa powder when the recipe calls for brown sugar, and carnation milk powder instead of malted milk [what is malted milk, anyways?])

Watch a marathon stack of reality t.v., or abc family dramas.

***
Here's my bit about sleep

I planned to go to sleep at midnight. It didn't happen, and now I'm yawning but I feel as if I should just write something here. (Which is the problem with blogs. You can't just leave it on the internet without feeling guilty about neglecting it, but then you keep on writing and every post is not what you expect, or want, and the overall quality and shininess of the blog just goes blech. I think that's what happened to our randomness blog. We tried to post regularly, which makes sense for a blog, but it also lost its fun, its randomness.

Anyways, I was looking up some reality t.v. shows on Wikipedia, and while browsing, I remembered seeing a comercial for a show called Dating in the Dark. So I looked up and watched the first two episodes. They were actually pretty good, because each episode had the uniqueness that was brought by the new people, and while the overall structures of each episode were the same, there were changes in what the girls and guys did before seeing each other in person. Like episode one where they had sketch artists to show everyone what they looked like.

Sorry, I feel like I'm writing like a 4th grader with no awareness of the vagueness of my pronouns and whatnot. I'll throw out the excuse of being beyond tired and not exactly aware of what I'm typing. The structure of the show isn't the point, anyways. On the first episode, one of the guys remarked upon the fact that he was a genius, as he was in Mensa. So I thought about that, and remembered how my sarcastic driving instructor once mocked a car in front of us that didn't know to pull into the bike lane before making a turn, but sported a license plate frame that happily proclaimed the driver's connection to Mensa. So I decided to find out exactly how Mensa operates. Wikipedia was pretty helpful - apparently Mensa members need to score at least at the 98th percentile for their list of recognized IQ tests, which usually equates to about an IQ of 130.

Okay, so I went to their website to see how exactly people take these tests/apply, as I remember reading a David Sedaris story about how he kept failing the Mensa entrance exams so I figured it was a nationwide or worldwide proctoring thing. I couldn't find anything here, but I did try the "Mensa Workout" which I didn't do so well on (24/30). My response to the first question on the test was actually quite funny. I didn't take into account past internet IQ tests I had taken, and how their tests focused on patterns in the form of numbers, shapes, and letters. So I click start and the first question is just like (warning, spoilers, in case you were curious about taking the test)

1 10 3 9 5 8 7 7 9 6 ? ?

and for a full minute my brain was like:

NUMBERSRANDOMNUMBERSINALINEWITHNOCORRELATIONATALL!???

But after I calmed down, it was okay. I got it right. I also got that other question where they tried to so cleverly integrate the Fibonacci sequence right, but I don't think it was marked correctly. Gr... 34 + 55 = 89, I'm pretty sure. I'll check back in the morning to verify my sanity.

Also, there was a question that I got wrong that amused me, because it reminded me of Poisonwood Bible, which I had just finished in the morning. The last morning, I mean. Tuesday Morning. (Adah is one of the coolest characters ever.) Mensa asked for the other word spelt by the letters in INSATIABLE, and all I could come up with was SATIN ABLE I. But the answer was BANALITIES, and I thought it was kinda funny. Insatiable banalities. And I think Adah could appreciate the way the same letters made these two words and their inherent meanings, even if they aren't as duplicitous as Kikongo words.

HOWEVER, all of that wasn't the point either. I finally realized I needed to go here in order to see how to apply (maybe it's not so good that it took me all of an hour to find this information?). There is a whole list of tests they could accept, but there were requirements: official reports (which made sense) notes and notarization (which marginally made sense) and an $18 processing fee (o-kay?). Anyways, apparently the ACT and SAT and PSAT aren't acceptable unless you took it prior to 1993. Which..I couldn't have. And the testing fee for a Mensa proctored exam is $40.

The point of all this? As it is very likely I will be coughing up $25 tomorrow, in order to send my neglected 10th grade AP scores to college (because, 10th grade me apparently was overexcited about bubbling and left a space between two letters of my last name), it occurs to me that Mensa is a lot like CollegeBoard. Except CollegeBoard pretends that they're nonprofit and advancing peoples' lives, and Mensa is like an Intelligent Braggart's club with a regularly published magazine, meetings, and a membership fee.

Well, maybe I shouldn't draw such a hard comparison on Mensa. The guy - Stephen - got the girl, after all, and I guess one and a half sleep deprived hours and a bitterness about a lack of a paycheck isn't enough to pass judgement on a worldwide genius/above average fellowship.

That car, though.

You flash your turn signal, check your blind spot, and pull into the bike lane, so that everyone else that is trying to drive straight across the intersection doesn't have to wait while you deduce the next moment in the sequence when the cars driving perpendicular to your car is 0.