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[girlbossblogsposts]

No one could ever convince me that men are smarter than women, but I'm so surprised that they managed to convince themselves

[girlbossblogsposts]

Life and Love

To admire love is to admire being alive, and I adore both because of the other.

I admire life because of what love has taught me to look for in it. Joy is in the smallest moments if you're focused enough to look for it, and love encourages you to look.

You cannot truly love your life without the most sincere knowledge of what it consists of. And even further, you cannot appreciate it without a sincere love for the things you find.

Unhappy people don't want to read between the lines, because the devil is in the details. Only truly happy people find joy in the subtleties of life, but when it all gets boiled down, that's all that life is: the subtleties.

To admire love and to admire being alive are the same things because one cannot exist without the other. To be alive means to love, and to love means to feel alive. To combine them brings a life worth loving, and who doesn't want that?

[girlbossblogsposts]

I had a friend who would giggle when I'd pronounce words as if I'd only read them, who you'd catch with a glowing smile when you admitted to not knowing something he did, and who never failed to try and make himself seem the smartest person in the room.

I'd never really been enchanted by his intelligence, but that isn't to say he had none, just that his version of it was much different than mine.

See, he considered intelligence to be memorization. All the names, dates, and specificities of a subject (to which he only specialized in one), was what he considered the height and extent of intelligence.

I see things differently. While the memorization of facts is all very impressive and can come in handy in a variety of situations, it isn't (to me) what makes a person truly intelligent. What makes someone intelligent is wit, problem solving capabilities, and that kind of genius that you know when you see it.

Once, I boasted very proudly (and with a bit more ego than men are used to seeing from women) that I considered myself to be smarter than them. Not in any kind of mean or malicious way, or even in a way that implied them stupid, just that I'd seen more life.

I'd lived through more tails, fought grander dragons, and emerged victorious from more ashes than he'd seen fires. And while I explained this to him, and said that I believed everyone to be smart in their own way, he still wasn't satisfied.

Maybe I'm the jerk for saying what everyone was thinking so clearly, and if I am, the only thing I have to say is, he had no such reservations in proclaiming himself the smartest person in the room.

His issue wasn't that it was rude to so brazenly call oneself out on the strengths so clearly evident over another, but that the receiver of the declaration wasn't himself.

I find this kind of behavior in men often. They're so used to having their egos stroked, and women so used to having their's dulled, that confrontation with their own inadequacy scares them.

But scared isn't the right word either: irritates or infuriates are more accurate to describe the look in his eye. It wasn't a conversation where one debated the merits of intelligence and what is valued over another, it was one where he expected me to bow.

He expected me to admit my wrong, to beg for forgiveness and proclaim that I (a stupid woman) had been led astray by my feeble womanly mind and was only shown the light by a stern manly mind who truly knows that intelligence is.

And maybe it is rude to call yourself smarter than another even if it is entirely true. I can admit to being rude easier than being stupid.

But I'll always be so thankful I didn't bow like the generations of women who would have had to bow before. The women who would have been bounced off the wall, ridiculed, or worse for daring to say in casual conversation what I did.

There was nothing he could do but stare at me with those desperate eyes of a man who has had nothing but an ego stroke his entire life, waiting patiently for yet another. I didn't give that to him, and that will always be the smartest thing I've ever done