looking smart, acting dumb

Self-portrait (“Eating a Banana”) by British artist Sarah Lucas.

A bit of dialogue from The Office that got me googling:

“A lot of crime in America.”
“Right. Well, I’ll be careful.”
“Word of advice: Keep your traveller’s cheques in a bum bag.”
“Thanks. I’ll buy one.”
“What, when you get there?”
“Yup.”
“Word of warning, then: Out there they call them fanny packs. ‘Cause fanny means your arse over there… not your minge.”

There are many directions in which I could take this dialogue, or rather, the reasons I find it so engaging. Differences and misunderstandings between British and American English provide endless (cannon) fodder for conversation, of course, and there’s also the subject of “bad language” that I want to get into at some point. But most interesting at the moment, at least to me, is the issue of intelligence. The Office is full of it, even though on the surface, it’s the kind of show where nothing much happens and what little is said has little to do with what is not said. It’s all about tacit knoweldge and an astounding lack of it, of course. But intelligence has to be more than being able to think on your feet, or knowing what to say or do in any given situation.

“You are not fully exploiting my intelligence,” says Rem Koolhaas to a colleague, in a recent New Yorker feature — which goes on to say, “Koolhaas’ quick-fire brain offers a steady flow of renegade ideas, most of which are exciting, and some of which are simply foolish. If architecture is too slow, Koolhaas is too fast.”

Intelligence is nothing to be ashamed of, but neither is it something to be sure of (keep reading that Gladwell article). At that infamous conference I went to, one of the speakers inevitably advised us to think outside the box, mentioning that this was a great “British expression.” I googled this one too for all it was worth, but I still haven’t really gotten to the bottom of it. It strikes me as more American a concept than British, but so did “fanny” until recently.

Back to Koolhaas, a quick wit is indeed a sign of intelligence, but isn’t slowness as well? Could anyone really solve that puzzle without some contemplation? I may be suggesting this in my own defense because more often than not it takes me days to come up with the right answer or the right course of action. In conversations, in delicate encounters, in transactions where I know that every word matters, sometimes I can’t even finish my sentences.

tempus fugit

*

Time, like God, is either necessary or nothing; if it disappears in one possible universe, it is undermined in every possible universe, including our own.**

We lost an hour yesterday, but in North America, for example, they have to wait another week for Daylight Saving Time to kick in. I don’t know what’s happening in other parts of the world, but doesn’t this inability even to agree on what time it is interfere with business, global markets, international travel, teleconferencing appointments, something neither here nor there but nevertheless of consequence?

That hour we lost is still over there; I wonder if anybody exploited it for us, if my 60-minute loss was somebody else’s gain. The kids had an extra hour to eat jelly beans and suffer the consequent belly aches, while Terri Schiavo suffered and starved one hour more than she would have here.

An hour disappeared. An hour (give or take a minute or two) is someTimes all it takes.

* These hieroglyphs “belong to” The British Museum
** from an article I read recently (I won’t be redundant by saying where) about Einstein’s relationship with Kurt Godel