You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The delicate balance between street smarts and book smarts.
My daughter is so bright she is incandescent. She is a shining diamond in a dusty coal mine. She is linguistically inclined like a secret agent.
She is astute in the classroom understanding concepts from molecular biology to mechanical engineering. Her brain is a series of ones and zeros calculating data at an alarming rate.
She is in the top percentage of kids in the country when it comes to standardized testing. She is off the charts when it comes to ACT scores and school reports.
She reads like the wind. She is the Michael Jordan of literary comprehension. Her eyes inhale words like RUN DMC inhales double chilli cheese burgers.
She writes effectively, convincingly, like a literary ballerina spinning precisely, effortlessly on one calloused frontal lobe.
My daughter is at the top of the totem pole of educational assimilation.
When she grows up, she wants to fly jets for the Navy. She wants to take off in 50 million dollar aircraft, landing on air craft carriers, bobbing and weaving in an angry tempestuous ocean.
She has the intelligence to find the ship in the dark.
But I wonder if she has the common sense to remember to put down the landing gear.
And there’s the conflict.
Street smarts versus book smarts.
My daughter has the street smarts of a blind man with a white cane crossing a busy intersection.
She recently went to Germany; a trip of a lifetime.
A day before she left, I upgraded her phone from broken screened transistor to a brand new iPhone.
I bought her a special international texting package so she could send me updates and pictures from Deutschland.
“200 texts in 10 days? That’s nothing,” she says in the AT&T store.
The salesman laughs.
For $40 dollars, that’ll be good enough I tell the sales rep.
“20 texts per day. You’ll have to make do.”
She frowns.
So a few days into the trip and I don’t receive one single text. Strange. Something is awry. My daughter, like every 18-year-old girl has a text addiction. She sleeps with one eye open and a finger on the send button. The chirp of a data message being received is the life blood of her existence, the pulse of who she is.
I text her asking for an update. Nothing.
I wonder if the text plan I bought is working. I wonder if it is just a one way plan.
Then a day later, I get an IM from her on Facebook.
“Hey dad. Funny thing about that new iPhone…”
“What?,” I ask.
I don’t get any response.
Hmmmm, I think to myself.
Recently she tells me a story how she was texting and walking on a dock. She tells me that she thought there was more dock, but there wasn’t. She steps right off the edge, into the lake, ruining another person’s phone. That’s right, she was texting on someone else’s smart phone.
AND WALKS, HEAD DOWN, FATUOUSLY INTO THE LAKE!!
Are you kidding me?
“How are you going to fly a 50 Million dollar aircraft,” I joke to her.
She laughs.
The next day, another Facebook IM.
“I love Germany.”
“What happened to your phone?” I ask.
“I left it in the Nashville airport.”
WTF?????
“Mom picked it up,” she says insouciant.
Great.
She has an iPhone for 1/2 a day and loses it.
The phone probably hasn’t made one phone call yet, and she leaves it on a long-term parking bus at the airport.
I pay for an international texting plan for a phone that never leaves the area code where it was born.
I call AT&T and explain the situation.
“So the phone never made it out of Nashville?,” the operator queries.
“Right. So I don’t need the international texting plan.”
Ha Ha Ha Ha.
The lady laughs out loud.
“Teenagers, right?”
And there it is in a nutshell.
Street Smarts vs book smarts.
How can the Navy trust her with a jet when I can’t trust her with an iPhone.
Teenagers?
Thankfully she’s only 18 and she can get street smarter.
Life’s Crazy™