Stuff to See!

One Out of Every Fifty People...

...Qualify for Mensa, the international high IQ society or something along those lines.
Where and when the idea of joining Mensa entered my head I don't completely remember, certainly sometime before summer, but not long before. The idea hadn't entered my head since I was a small child first hearing of this society of brainy folk who, curiously, decided to talk and listen to each other. But at some undetermined point this year it hit me like a bolt out of the blue: join Mensa. I seem to recall hearing it would look good on a resume, but my real reasons, if I have any at all, are entirely unrelated.
For the record I haven't been accepted yet.
The single qualification for membership is scoring in the top 2% on a recognized standardized test. In my nascent research into joining this society I came upon something called 'prior evidence of intelligence', which was a list of some considerable number of tests that could be used to prove one's worthiness. Among the more common ones are the SAT and GRE, both of which I've taken in the past and, to my surprise, on both I had well above the minimum accepted score. On a prior occasion I have discussed how I believe that test taking skills are not exactly the same as intelligence, although the two work well together. The short of it is that I frown upon the idea that a test score is an accurate mark of intelligence, although it can be an accurate mark of one's ability to take tests, so I entertained this notion of joining such a society, albeit with at least a grain of salt.
Seeing that I could test in rather easily, if one considers tracking down certified transcripts easy, I decided to try to enter Mensa the hard way, by taking the actual admissions tests. I did this thing on Friday, October 15th.
As ol' Jack Burton would say, what the hell!
I won't say much about the tests themselves to maintain the integrity of the process since the experience is still pretty fresh in my mind. What surprised me was that there weren't many registrants to this particular session. I have no idea how many people registered, but there were only five in my particular testing session, two men and three women, all between 18-40 years of age.
We took these tests at the Stillmeadow Evangelical church in West Baltimore, not exactly the best part of town, but not nearly the worst. I chose this location because I could walk to it in pretty short time, if I felt brave or foolish enough. The Maryland chapter of Mensa meets there on the third Friday of each month anyway so I had the chance to see one of their meeting if I so chose, although I didn't notice that at the time.
The testing process itself took a little less than an hour and a half. After a short, but active, day of work, and the mental rigors of a timed test session, I wasn't sure if I'd be up to a meeting, so I waited on some of my fellow testees to see if they would stay.
They all left.
Perhaps they were as tired as I was, or they had other responsibilities (two had small children at home, whereas I presume that the other two did not, being younger than myself, and of course I have no children that I know about). At any rate they left, and I left not long after, not really feeling up to any social activity. In my mind I didn't want to participate in an event until I was actually welcomed to join the club, although perhaps a little misanthropy or shyness fed into that decision as well.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm a solitary person who rarely ventures out into social situations for various reasons. So why join a society like Mensa, which seems to me to be a social club, albeit one of a different color? I do like the company of other people, although not most of them, being pretty much of a potted plant. I joked to friends of mine that I was doing this to find a mate, and while the three female applicants on hand were very easy on the eyes, it's an inherently shallow notion that I'd only accept a so-called intelligent mate. Nonetheless, having enough upstairs to make conversation interesting is important to me.
Other social situations, unless they involve close friends, don't really appeal to me, and even the ones with friends are a hard sell. Being the mischievous man-child that I am, I spend more time playing with people than actually giving them an objective chance; that's bad of me and points to perhaps greater issues, but for whatever reason I found it amusing. No longer, though. Now I just stay away from it all. Even for an self-proclaimed antisocialite, I would like to have a chance to inflict myself on others in a setting that would be more conducive to meeting interesting people than...a bar. Most people I know are worth taking the time to get to know regardless of their skills in test taking, so perhaps I'd be better off just going to the park and greeting random people, although I could be killed doing so.
So Mensa it is. Assuming I get in, of course. :-)