Clearly. After all, my headline is ‘I’m No Genius.’
By David Mantey, Editor, PD&D
Only $100k a year for being a genius? Excuse me a moment while I toss out my Mensa study book in the recycling bin.
Suddenly I understood my friends’ pursuit of sedentariness and Uncle Sam teat suckling. Sure, you can bust your ass to one day be declared a genius – even though you often did so while stumbling through collegiate glory – or you can earn a livable percentage with a daily dose of The Price Is Right and Little Caesars for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Now that 30 is turning out to be the new 20 (if those in their 40s can say it’s the new 30, we can work off the same sliding scale), we just bought another decade of personal deniability. Here’s to silencing internal dialoge.
The idea of ever receiving a grant dubbed ‘genius’ proves to be decent water cooler fodder after Fantasy Football Week 2 dismay is exhausted and before lamentations focused on hump day misery. If you received one, what would you do with it? It’s a better conversation starter than anything lottery-focused. As a MacArthur Fellow, there is a bit more on the line rather than planning to buy a bitchin’ ride after you won on a $5 crossword scratch-off.
Even though your 2009 fellow Fellows would include an infectious disease physician, an ornithologist, a realist painter, a photojournalist, a bridge engineer, a climate scientist, an economist and a papermaker — you would also be in the company of a mental health lawyer and a poet, so your “potential to make important contributions in the future” wouldn’t be entirely unfeasible.
What would you do with $500,000 in no-strings support over the next five years? How would you take that $500,000 and try to make the world a better place?
The flickering candle of the remaining English major dreamer in my soul is still convinced that I’d attempt to shower the world with contemporary classics, maybe just a lone opus that would spiral into 2,000 pages of maniacal free association that would then be used by a future mental health Fellow to discover the trendy new mental disorder of our generation.
The idea behind the MacArthur grant is deceptively simple. Here’s a check, go.
It seems that many of us have been following the carrot for too long to be able to fathom a life without it. It’s similar to an old friend’s wisdom behind his inability to dance. The mountain of a man has always been a lineman. Since he was in ninth grade, a coach told him where to move his feet until the whistle blew. When he was on the dance floor, he was lost without a gap to cover. Now, he’s a teacher with a gig coaching a new herd of rhythmless jocks – as a former jock who remains without rhythm, I have a license to poke fun.
I suppose the fine people at The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation do their best to make sure people like John A. Rogers of Urbana, IL, an applied physicist who is a leader in developing flexible electronic devices, and Theodore Zoli of New York, a bridge engineer who has made major technological advances to protect transportation infrastructure when there is a disaster, are the beneficiaries.
Who knows? Maybe they survey the line at Little Caesars while you wait for your Hot and Ready, too.
Spend a sentence; What would you do as a Fellow? Post below or email me at david.mantey@advantagemedia.com.