Am I Smarter Than a 5th Grader?

Dear No One in Particular,

I'd like to think I am. Smarter than the average 10 year-old, that is. Obviously, I'm more than a little obsessed with the TV show. My mom and I bought the DVD home game for my dad for Christmas last year, and I actually beat the damn thing! So, according to the DVD, I AM smarter than a 5th grader! (Fun Fact: the million-dollar question was anthropology based!) Natch, I play along with the show, and while I do get questions wrong, I'm not exactly flunk-out-stupid.

At any rate, my mother keeps threatening to sign me for auditions to be on the show. She's convinced I could win big. I'm convinced I need to cease to be a repository of useless childhood trivia. Also, I watch Golden Girls -- I learned from Dorothy Zbornak's mistakes, and I know I'm not personable enough to be on game shows. I'm too caustic, too reserved. I have no interesting life stories to babble endlessly on about. I refuse to talk in circles about my answer to whatever 4th grade Social Studies question is lobbed at me.

Now this is not to say that I'm some mega-genius who would kick ass at an idiotic TV game show. (I totes would though. ...just sayin'....) I'm convinced that my nerves would kick in, and I'd be so panicked that I'd forget my own name, much less how to form competent answers.

But what's really stopping me from semi-seriously considering a chance at a cool mill? Is this.

Take it in, in all it's glorious stupidity. Obviously, geography is not my strongest subject. I have no sense direction (which is why God gave us GPS-equipped CrackBerries), so it's really no surprise that I can't reproduce a map from memory. If given a blank map of the US, I could probably fill it out with some degree of accuracy, but wow. I love the fact that past the Mississippi, the country is just a void in which Maine floats alone.

I'm banking on the fact that no future employer is going to ask me to reproduce a map of the US, but it is enough to keep me off the game show circuit. ...For now.


--amanda