Thoughts on Intelligence

Tonight, as usual, I was sitting on the bus coming from Wilfred Laurier University where my boyfriend lives in residence. I wasn't really eavesdropping, but a few words from a conversation between two female university students caught my attention. I mean, they were talking unnecessarily loudly, so it was kind of hard not to hear them. Anyways.

Something that will always confuse me infinitely is the way some girls (and guys) talk to each other, especially university students. Obviously, they are rather intelligent beings, otherwise they wouldn't be in university, therefore they wouldn't be sitting next to me on the bus coming from the university. However, in complete contrast to this fact, some of these students always seem to dumb themselves down when interacting with each other.

This is what I am talking about:

The two girls were talking about where they were actually going as they sat in the bus. One of the girls mentioned the street name, and the other said, "How do you know these random street names? I can never remember them." The first girl replied, "Well, I took the bus for over a year, and you get so bored if you don't have music, you start to read the street signs." My first thought was, So this is why no one looks at their surroundings. They've got an iPod stuck to they're head. My second thought was, Wow, did you ever sound dumb just then.

As I was thinking this over in my head, the street sign-reading girl said something else that made me think, oh, brother and I hope you don't find me to be too judgmental for it. The girls had now moved on to scars that they had acquired over their extended period of existence. The sign-reading girl said something along the lines of, "Well, I don't bruise very easily because when I was little, I fought with my sister a lot and I got picked on in school, so my body just got used to it. That's why I don't really bruise. But I do have this one scar..." and that's where I stopped listening to marvel. The astonishing thing (one of many) is , I could pick up a note of conscious dumbing-down while she was speaking. Which just made me feel sort of sad for her.

It confounds me to think that the acknowledgement of all that hard work that these people put into being accepted into university is simply shoved aside when they are talking with their peers. Something that makes even less sense to me is that they all go to university. So why in the world would you pretend that you're stupid? Unless you truly are, of course. Then, by all means, ignore this post.