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.

One good writer

                           

Awhile ago I became obsessed with THE LAST HUNDRED YEARs, Jane Smiley's trilogy following an Iowa farm family from 1918 to 2018 — well-written, funny & exciting & sad, so many characters you had to keep going back to the family tree — and insights (increasingly dark) into us as a country. All day I looked forward to reading it (I only allow myself to read after dinner unless I am sick) and when I got to the end, I burst into tears, partly because the ending was surprising and sad.

Then I went back and read the whole thing again from start to finish, not hurrying the second time. I think I enjoyed it partly because of the large cast and multiple points of view — I like big, sprawling novels that (like life) aren't all one mood or one thing. 

But then I was stuck in that horrible place of not having anything to read. As usual I reread old favorites until I could find something. Finally the library opened and I got everything by Jane Smiley they had.

I started with One Thousand Acres, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. The flap copy told the whole plot! As if that wasn't bad enough, it's based on King Lear. Not surprisingly, I guess, it seeemed pretty depressing. My interest waned after a few increasingly ominous chapters....and I think she found it depressing, too, because her next book, which I am reading right now, is MOO U and it's hilarious.

The title is an agricultural university's nickname, and the book is a really funny send up of academic life, complete with not just turf wars and insane egos but a hog whose secret pen (he's part of an experiment and grant) lies at the center of the campus. His thoughts are given, too — Jane Smiley is really good with animals, as I know from the first book of hers I read, HORSE HEAVEN.

In every room his wife had laid a Persian carpet of exceptional quality — his wife had an eye for quality in all things — and it seemed like every Persian carpet in every room every morning was adorned with tiny, dark tense turds deposited there by Eileen, the Jack Russell terrier....Rosalind, who sent her underwear to the cleaners  and had the windows washed every two weeks and kept her oven spotless enough to sterilize surgical instruments, tried to take the position that the turds were small and harmless, and that the carpets could handle them, but really she just thought the dog was cute... [not the end of the sentence but you get the idea]

The characters, animal and human, in MOO U aren't as three-dimensional as those in Horse Heaven, which I also read twice, but it's even funnier, at least for anyone who has suffered through working in academia. It's satire: over the top situations and exaggerated characters that sent me to sleep in a good mood from laughing so much. And I woke up in a good mood, too — of how many books can one say that? 

Full disclosure: I didn't start the book at the beginning (unusual for me) — I was just flipping through to see if I'd like it when something caught my eye and I kept reading.

Once in the early 1990s, my friend KC, who lives in New York and recommended HOG HEAVEN, and I were in a bookstore in Calistoga, CA. The store sold only books. A sign by the cash register — a long sign — said in big letters that the store reserved the right to refuse service to anyone and then in smaller letters explained.

KC said, polite but puzzled,

“Do some people take too many?” The cashier looked puzzled. “Do you sometimes have to cut people off?”

The cashier explained that people sometimes tried to pay with credit cards they didn't accept — and we all laughed as KC said, “No more for you, you've had enough!” like a bartender. 

But I love KC's interpretation. I'm probably someone who reads too much— but some books make reading a lot of fun, so much fun that it cheered me up.