I have no dumb friends
Last night I started wondering who my dumbest friend was. Lest this seem like a particularly heartless inquiry, I should clarify that I was falling asleep and often think of stupid things while falling asleep. As useless bedtime ponderings go, this was probably somewhere in the middle.
By dumb I don’t mean the friends who do stupid things lack of perspective or emotional maturity. I mean the friend who is just playing with a smaller deck than everybody else. And by friend, I mean actual friend, not casual accquaintance who friended me on Facebook (the friendsters). On the other hand, I’m not being overly restrictive with the term. I could easily count fifty to a hundred people who I would consider friends.
I realized that I have no dumb friends. This is not a “there are no dumb people only different people” realization. I am sure there are a lot of dumb people out there, but they, by and large, don’t happen to be my friends. Sure—I have friends who do dumb things—but in terms of raw intelligence, I am not particularly close to anybody dumb. And I don’t mean that all my friends are all brilliant “in their way”. If I gave a standardized test or a set of logic problems to all of my friends, I would expect all of them to perform somewhere in certifiably the gifted level. Not only do I have no dumb friends, I don’t have any of average or only slightly above average intelligence.
I don’t say this to brag. I’m actually a little concerned about this. Does this give me a dangerous lack of perspective? Have I surrounded myself with a fringe of brilliant people? Do I understand what makes people work and why they behave the way they do? Are some of the warning labels I consider completely unnecessary actually important? Who do I blame for my lack of dumb friends? Is it my own prejudice or society conspiring against me?
Is this something I need to fix? Do I need to go out and make friends with an average guy? Where do I find him?
