I Was Here First

I have many tags. Sometimes I am a computer nerd. Sometimes I am an internet hack, a philosopher, a science nerd, an amateur mathematician,… Tonight, I am wearing my writer's hat -- the hat I often wear when I am contemplating a new point of view. In my previous post, I discussed that instead of my drive-by spray-paint tag of “gifted”, I preferred the infinity symbol exclamation point tag. Tonight, I wanted to delve more into the word “gifted”.

First of all, I want to dispel the rumor that Harry Potter smite me in utero with his magic wand, giving me some magic gift in my head, that I must now share with infinite patience and gratitude like a burger joint with curbside service. I am afraid Harry was previously engaged at the time of my birth, probably with some cute little red haired chick. Instead, in some organic goo pool, actually, a number of them stretching back 300,000 years or so, the dials of some chemical slot machine spun. Ding, lemons and gold bars were displayed and out I popped. Contrary to popular belief, I was not given a gift nor was I a gift to the world. As far as being a gift to my parents, who knows what was on their minds nine months before.

Traveling to adulthood was a rather interesting process of being bored to the point of actually crying and then being studied/tested to see what changes that caused. The tormenting ceased being entertaining so I was actually given something to do for a while. Soon, though, it was back to boredom again. Actually, before being excreted to college to fertilize some ideas there, I accidentally made a fairly large explosion in some high school chemistry lab vent hood. And in my high school job, I learned the amazing fact that a school system’s repair person’s tool bag contains four items: a screwdriver, wire cutters, electrical or duct tape (electrical tape was a higher pay grade), and WD-40 lubricant spray. It is just amazing how well audio-visual equipment and school intercoms work after a nice WD-40 bath. My job involved me reverting said equipment back to its former sad working state. Actually, to tell the truth, I worked for a small business so it was a little more than that. I got to experience dead rats falling on me as I replaced a restaurant’s chewed-through speakers and repair the sound system at some disco with some rather impressive … well let’s not talk about that one.

I searched through all of this and I just wondered, where is the gift? Oh, well, I did get a lot of money from the school system courtesy of the school repair person. It beats flipping burgers. Perhaps the gift was the little voice in my head 24x7 saying, “Learn something new or I’m going to hurt you.”

With all the draining of school budgets and all the clawing and scratching and identity politics being played with, I want to plant one little perspective. Every race has “gifted” people (as far as I know). Using a little computation of the evolutionary chemical slot machine, that means one interesting thing. Giftedness occurred before all race differentiation in humans. Gifted was the original differentiation in the human race. So all I’ve got to say about all the political gamesmanship and prioritizing for resources is this: I was here first. And I am still here, waiting to be the fullest of my potential. So are many others, still too young to have a voice. But they all share one thing in common: They have an exceptionally good memory for what was done to them in their childhood and that little voice.