Took the MOCA (the test Trump "aced")

Most of the questions were super-easy, but the first one had me stumped. How could you connect those dots into a cube, starting and ending where they wanted you to start and end???

I tried and tried, but I couldn't do it. The closest I got was a sort of rectangle — and even then, I put some of the dots in the middle of lines, not at their end points, and skipped one:

                                   Erasure marks are from earlier attempts -- and I know I can't draw.

Could it be a trick question, designed to see how people thought “outside the box”? I know those exist, but the rest of the questions were so simple that much as I wanted to believe that, it didn't seem likely. It was frustrating to be unable to see the answer.

I know I'm a bad spatial thinker — and I also know I am not senile. Yet I had failed  this part of the test. I began worrying that some day, my mental state WOULD be tested by someone and I would be judged incompetent because I couldn't do it. I began planning what I would say:

“I've always been a bad spatial thinker! Even when I was young I was! Look how many words I could think of that began with F — more than a hundred! Besides, lots of creative people...” Then they would just think I was crazy and difficult as well as senile. So I decided I better practice this skill, starting by looking up the answer to that question.

Plus, I admit, a stronger motive was: I just HAD TO KNOW HOW TO DO IT OR THE ANSWER! 

It turns out that those first two items are two different questions. First, you form the dots into a sequence numerically and alphabetically, then you copy the cube. Easy peasy. No need to even do it, I knew I could.

I was relieved, and also reminded of all the times my imagination over-complicates things or doesn't see the obvious — like the time my friend Grace and I planned to bind the drafts of our novels by punching holes into the paper, then looping ribbon through the holes to make beautiful bound books like our friend Alissa's, whose super-power is making everything perfectly, even her potholders. She makes designs with scraps and pieces each potholder to fold in just the right spot for her hand.

   Copyright Ⓒ Alissa Imre Geis, Alissaimregeis.com

But Grace and I couldn't make books like hers: our holes were never in the same places on all 200+ pages, the ribbon wouldn't go through them — only string would. The finished “books” were messy papers, nothing like Alissa's tidy creations. Punching the holes was really hard, too.

Then one of us emailed the other in the middle of the night with a revelation: “We can just buy three-hole paper!” But we hadn't seen it that way, even in all the time we spent punching those holes.

As artists the way we see things (ridiculous as they sometimes are) and do them (obsessive as it sometimes is) are all we have — there's no choice.  Sometimes doing it brings us joy, sometimes not; but we have to do it our way.

An artist in Stonington makes the wrapping of each package a work of art —

Copyright Ⓒ Pamela Zagarenski, sacredbee.com

I get caught up in my own ideas and expressing them as clearly as I can. But that isn't always a good plan. In a test situation — if my competence ever is tested — it will be better to just answer the questions and keep what interests me to myself.  And I won't over-think the questions, either, as I did when I was a child taking an IQ test.

The question was, “What would be the best size for a living room?” I hesitated between two of the choices: 

b)12 x 14 

or

c) 1200 x 1400. (A & B were ridiculously large or small.) I knew most living rooms were 12x14 — but they didn't ask what was average, they asked what would be  “best,” so I chose c, with a nagging feeling that that was the wrong answer.

So when I got home I asked my father about it.

“For an IQ test, Libby, you probably got the answer wrong. But I like the way you think: why not have a living room the size of a king's?”

If my competence is tested, though, I'll play it safe — and, I hope, pass the test.