What would it be like to be a "noted intellectual" she wondered as she drank coffee on the 14 year old couch, the sound of the bird pecking for seed at the bottom of her cage, a loud but distant plane in the sky, cars, kids, a neighbor's barking dog, and the electric hum of the house all creating the background music of the morning.
As a teenager inferiority and envy might have been her yin/yang. Or desire and disdain. Two sides of her coin. She had wanted to be very smart, the kind of smart that would get her into Harvard. And she wanted to be very beautiful, the kind of beautiful whose thighs don't touch, the kind of beautiful that gets invited to all the best parties, the kind of beautiful that has a popular boyfriend.
As a grown woman in her late 40s with a job at a Silicon Valley company, she had found at least some measure of success, which came about through smarts, creativity and tenacity. And finally, at this point in her life she felt beautiful, even with her non-conforming body. In fact, all those things that made her so self-conscious in high school helped created her strength as an adult.
Yet still, when she watched the MIT send up video of Gangnam Style, she felt like she was looking through teen eyes: look at all those brilliantly smart rich kids. Or if not rich, so smart they got paid to go to school. What would it be like to be that brilliant? And then, the cameo by Noam Chomsky. Him she would never be, gender and age differences aside. She was smart but not like the theorists, the cultural critics, and the philosophers. And sometimes that still pained her.
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