Very Clever...

My mother was a very smart woman. She probably wouldn't have agreed with that statement, deferred a little bit, but she was. Especially with math. I'm pretty sure I've written before about going through the grocery store and getting to the check out and she would know the total. Rarely was she off by more than a few cents, if that. If she was off by more then there was a disagreement with the shelf price and the register. It was a cool trick.

She taught us all how to do it. We had to be able to add prices, to figure out change (change is what you got back in the day when we used actual cash to pay for things. Cash was paper or metal bits that we used for money instead of tapping a credit card or phone), to figure out percentages for discounts. The sort of math I call practical math. She was an expert at practical math and tried to teach all of us the same.

Funny side story...my mother taught us all how to do that sort of math in our heads. She used little tricks to make it easier. A few years ago when "Common Core" hysteria really picked up a friend scanned in their kid's homework so we could all marvel at how ridiculous it was. It was the way my mother taught us how to do math. The way I still do math in my head. This "new math" was really old math and if they hadn't fought it so hard it was better math, in my opinion.

Anyway...

If you asked my mother she would tell you that she was not good at math. Which I totally get because I often say the same thing. I will tell you that I'm not any good at math while at the same time I have a degree in accounting and was on the dean's list the entire time I was in school and graduated with the highest honors. But that's practical math. It doesn't count. I don't know trigonometry or calculus. I didn't even understand algebra until I had to take in college. I also can't add a cartful of groceries in my head, but that's due to ADD more than not being good at math.

The other reason my mother would downgrade her own intelligence was because she wasn't quick with a quip or comeback. She would think of the perfect comeback about two hours later. It drove her crazy. We'd be sitting down to dinner and she'd say, "Oh shoot, I should have said...." and it was always funny and would have been a perfect comeback, but it was never quick. She would talk about her sister Dorothy being quick with comebacks. That if someone was rude or snotty to her she always had the perfect biting remark right at hand. Mom just didn't. And she took it as a fault.

But...

When you ask anyone who knew her they would say one of the best things about my mother was her kindness. She was always kind to people. She smiled and laughed easily. She always asked after families and remembered the last conversation she had with you. People who knew her from the carwash would tell me about how lovely she was. How they always enjoyed getting a few minutes to visit with her when they were paying.

Even people who were snippy with her she was kind to in return. Because she couldn't think of the snotty response until later. Unlike Dorothy.

John Scalzi writes a reminder every once in awhile that the failure mode of clever is asshole. Sometimes when we think we're being clever, giving that quick clever quip, it comes across as being an asshole.

Aunt Dorothy was a lot quicker than Mom, but we kids always thought she was kind of mean. She'd tease a lot. She'd poke at your soft parts. She was fast, but she wasn't as kind.

I tend to lean a little more toward Aunt Dorothy. I'm pretty solid with a quick slam if somebody comes at me. But I often try to be like my mother and remind myself that it's easier to be clever than kind so I should do the hard thing and be kind. It doesn't always work. When it does I tell my devastating quip to Brent so I can get credit for not saying it.

It still is interesting to me what we in society value and think of as intelligent, as worthy. To me practical math and kindness seems better than calculus and clever quips that often fall short and become just "asshole."

But that's probably just because I can't do calculus.