bright but not brilliant

At the end of my doctoral program, my advisor was done, forever, with my file. "Here," he said casually. "Take this down to the office." I began to walk down the three flights, holding my file with its recommendations, its confidential information, its juice about me. A nobler soul might not have peeked at the contents. I'm not exactly sure why she wouldn't have; I just know it would have been noble somehow. I couldn't think of any reasons not to peek that outweighed my curiosity at the time. Grad school was being shelved anyway; might as well paw through the archives.

I continued clomping down the stairs so as to force a limit on my peeking time. The very first piece of paper in the file was the recommendation from my college advisor, Dan Meerson. This would be juice, all right. Fun! I had aced all of Dan's courses, and hadn't hesitated to ask him for a rec. I read in search of a little ego bounce.

Dan's recommendation opened with: "Paula Chu is bright but not brilliant." I don't remember reading beyond that line. A brilliant person might have been able to take in more, but in that moment those seven words occupied all the space in my brain.

So there it was. He called it. I was disappointed to feel how deeply it resonated, how right Dan was. It stings when you realize that your brain has only so many neural networks, that many of them are not terribly efficient or well-maintained. They are instead pretty ordinary little electrical connections, all ball and socket wiring. They are labeled: "Do not exceed 60 watts." It's light enough to read by, but you feel the strain.

Eventually, though, Dan's comment came to be a very freeing thing. I have bright-but-not-brilliant moments all the time, and now there's a (crowded) place to put them in my mind. Ah, there it is again, I think to myself whenever I trip over the verity of Dan's observation.

"Bright but not brilliant!" I will shout out when I am adjusting the sprinkler and am soaked by the end of the process. "Bright but not brilliant" I muttered to myself when I assembled Yani's shoe rack in her dorm room the other day. Spot the error.

Screwing up this simple task was a low blow, a narcissistic wound, as such assembly is generally one thing I can do, because it is less a matter of smarts than of persistence. It turns out that I just can't be thinking about anything else while I do it. Tant pis; Dan was so right.

You want to see smoke coming out of a brain that's carrying too heavy a voltaic load? I am trying to figure out how to write a book. I can hardly see for the smoke! Just mentioning it here sets off the alarm two floors up.

Figuring out what that book should be about is harder than Sudoku, a game invented to make the aging brain go gently into the darkness dragging a sack of fresh humble pie. I am always so disappointed when I have to peek at the back of the book, but I can tell that if I don't, the snarl is going to get worse and worse. Sudoku makes me feel very limited, wattage-wise. Or is it volts? Oh, Dan, Dan.

Raising the writing idea here is my way of peeking at the back in the middle of a Sudoku. Can anyone give me a hint? Email me. I know in the center there is a 1, and there's a 4 and a 6 I've had since the beginning. Happily there is a 5 --and a 2 -- I'm very sure about, too, but that's all I've got.