Getting Smart Fast

I’ve pretty much become fat dumb and happy in retirement. The fat relates to the fact that my toes are sometimes hiding from my eyes when I look for them: The dumb is because I still believe the stock market is eventually going to recover and move me back into the middle class: And the happy part goes with marrying a beautiful woman who doesn’t open the front door each morning and announce, “Isn’t it time you went back to work?”

My work for the past number of years has been in the writing of my novels, but I can’t really call that work since the dollar inflow is far less than the dollar outflow, and even more important is the fact that I love doing it: And by any definition of the word work that was drummed into my brain as I was growing up, you can’t really love your work.

So I guess by those definitions, I fit into the category of the perennially unemployed. Well…at least until a few weeks ago.

E-mail is a terrible thing, because sometimes you answer a question that has been posed to you with a yes, and then press send long before your brain has worked through all of the ramifications of your index finger’s actions. So when a friend of mine sent a message and asked if I would be interested in doing a little unpaid consulting work, the unpaid part pretty much exactly fit what I've been doing in my writing, so I said “why not.” I then dove head first into a pool of Olympic class scientists who have been working at their crafts for many years and started pretending I was a good swimmer.

After finding a billion articles on the Internet about things that I should know but don’t, I narrowed my focus down to several million of them that I had better learn quickly before my dog paddling legs tire out, and I just go under with my mouth open.

How do you get smart fast? I never even mastered the art of doing it slowly. I looked for the Handbook for Dummies on the subject of interest, but Amazon for some reason doesn’t carry it, and when I looked into brain transplants, I couldn’t find a suitable donor in my price range.

Getting stupid fast, I’ve pretty much mastered that skill, and now I have to learn a new one.