THAT DAY

I start illustrating a dream-poem, Snapdragon. (Caution: dragon/human/werewolf sex!)

Then I paint more of my new planet, a very hot world called, naturally, Capsica. The relief's done but the color's patchy. Still, I've nearly girdled the equator now. Slow but... slow.

I've been reading a lot of kids' books about prodigies (so far all written by non-prodigies, grrr!) and most have been painful reads--always some isolation, exploitation, and/or bullying. Today it's Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks. The early bits with his do-nothing adoptive parents and clueless public school are funny if dark--give me flashbacks. The title, we soon learn, refers not to Cadel but his dad. Cadel just likes to tinker recklessly with systems and relates to people badly. Except math freaks.

Thank god I'm not that extreme. Or am I? I get all mad at myself because I can't grasp Jinks's explanation of Stormer numbers--reread it a few times before I get that I don't get it because SHE doesn't get it. She's just the author, not a math whiz! But I'm not one either. Sure, I prove 26²+1 is prime in my head, but I should have done that in seconds not a few minutes, and I shoulda instantly realized Stormer's series uses a somewhat arbitrary threshhold of 2n for flagging the rare factor-rich n²+1...

Hmm, let's invent a friendlier series. I declare friendlies or antiprimes to have more non-trivial factors (not 1 or n) than their square root... Clear antiprimes are 12, 24, 30, 36, 48, 60, 72, 84, 90, 96, 120... but why pick only the stars? Graph ALL integers radially on a clock face (a 12-cycle) making the length of the "hand" the square root of n; a spiral of numbers. Let brightness mark factorability...

Nah. No math geeks in dis woodpile, boss. Face it. I'm a Cadel. Just minus the training in explosives.

Evil Genius continues a trend--both books on child prodigies I read last week, Millicent Min and The Report Card, also had geniuses hiding their brains to be accepted. I didn't or couldn't, and was ostracized. Third option: get promoted way beyond your emotional capacity like the driven daughter in Nikita Lalwani's Gifted. Or be comfy but exploited in elite schools like Diane Stanley's Allbright Academy (or uncomfortable and exploited as in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game).

Enjoy your options, fellow geeks.

THAT NIGHT...

College. I rearrange the pillows on my bed there--one course is on sleep and dreaming, and it's experiential--we're required to sleep in class! Another is art--I'm doing a big project there. But as I leave that class I get the sinking feeling I've forgotten totally about two others required for graduation! Never even showed up for them... again. I keep signing up then skipping them, quarter after quarter. One is a hard math course but what's the other? Can't remember.

I walk along a promenade or pier by the Bay, thinking "this disease has affected my brain as well as body. My math abilities are much weaker, I can't visualize..."

Ahead, I spot strange activity. And that matters, since I'm Hercule Poirot. Though I'm not living in a novel by Agatha Christie--this is a much later knockoff by someone else, an Aussie or Zealander I think.

What I see is two guys in the water dragging a third to the pier. Half on it, he vomits over and over. Not much comes up. Swallowed sea water? Seems to be breathing fine. But the auras of all three feel like trouble. Here come some friends; they help the sick guy into a doorway. I walk up and follow them in.

A maze of locker rooms full of these boys with creepy auras. A couple of them have strap-on alicorns on their foreheads--pink fleshy ones, very phallic. In fact... are they dildos?

Whoa. Genuine dickheads!

Several times, I march back to the door as if to leave, and then, feeling the relief fill the room, I turn back and confront them again. Nervouser and nervouser! Their auras sour even more. And the wrongness concentrates on one guy. A stench of guilt--not guilt FEELINGS, not at all, he's shameless; just the sense he's been caught and his crime is serious. I pounce on him, arrest him for a sensational murder. The police come in to drag him off. A day's work well done!

Now what? What do you do when the author of your own dreams plots against you?

WHAT'S IT MEAN?

• Four classes: the four prompts that appear in my journal at the end of each day: Health? Art? Dating? Ambition?--the four hardest things for me.
• Two OK but two forgotten: I've worked on health and art, but neglected dating and ambition.
• "I can't do math..." etc: I did start talking to myself like this, just before bed, studying the Stormer sequence. And it was right--while I listened to it yammer! Soon as I silenced that jerky voice and actually tried it, I was fine!
• Poirot: rather like a grown-up mellowed-out Cadel: eccentric vain but non-evil genius... with friends.
• Aussie author: Catherine Jinks, of Evil Genius
• Alicorns: today the word's often used to mean "winged unicorn" but the original, medieval meaning was a unicorn's (or narwhal's) horn, whether intact or ground up; used as medicine. The gang's strapped dildos on their faces to show they're tough guys. Quiver in fear, my friends!
• Dickheads: for any child prodigy, this pretty much sums up school.
• Vomiting, guys, girl declares me wrong, I don't think so: Evil Genius! Cadel's a high school senior at 13; his classmates fuck, drink, do drugs, puke--and call HIM a creep. Gifted girl he admires rejects him for the prom, says it's not his age but his arrogance. He is, but I'm amazed he still reaches out at all, rejected as he is. Gives me flashbacks. Though I was different--gave up trying to belong and lived in my own world.
• Detective and gang: I glanced at Britten and Brülightly by Hannah Berry. Everyone calls Britten French. Poirot gets called French too though he's Belgian. Britten fights a murderous consipiracy of waiters. In dickies. Dickheads!
• ACTION: take any action toward dating and shows/publication. Total neglect gets me nowhere. And SHUT UP THAT INNER CRITIC!
• ACTION: paint the dickheads. It's just so funny. The secret gang with pink dildos on their foreheads. A great challenge for Poirot, the world's most unapologetic, flaming, VAIN brain. Which he flaunts like a fluorescent weenie too.

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