Recently I’ve been invited by friends to participate in many trivia and puzzle games and to take a few IQ tests. It’s funny, but I tend to perform fairly well at these things, but I never feel as if it’s an accurate reflection of my intelligence, or my lack of it.

Well, actually … I don’t do that well in trivia, so I can exclude that. My mind just doesn’t have the knack for silly little details like names and dates when all my fascination lies in the abstract. But I definitely excel at puzzles involving shapes, numbers, logic, or words.

The numbers part of it bewilders me. I’ve always done well in math, but I’m incapable of using it in any practical sense. In fact, I almost majored in math and probably would have gone through with it if I hadn’t been so completely indifferent to the subject, but any time I need to add a few figures in my head or come up with the right tip at a restaurant, I find myself flailing and turning to H.E. for the right answers because more often than not I’ll be off by some egregious amount.

I do particularly well in spatial math—the visual kind of math like geometry and trigonometry, anything to do with 3D space really. In fact, I believe I scored my only A plus grades in those classes, and when I took the Spatial IQ test on Facebook that Minnie invited me to take, I managed to score 164: Exceptionally Gifted.

Which made me laugh because I have so much trouble gauging sizes and distances in real life. I am forever crashing into walls or corners because I have no sense of my own personal space, and I am forever choosing the wrong sized box for one reason or another. H.E. actually has cute nicknames for me that play on the words spatial and oriental because my ineptitude is such a big part of my character, my supposed math IQ might as well be a complete myth.

I do less well in language than in math, but I manage to score well at those tests, too, sometimes. Still, you should hear me talk and see me visibly struggle with words. I am in no way as verbally articulate as I might seem in writing. I am Mrs. Malaprop personified, and I was born with both my feet and a silver spoonerism in my mouth. Every now and then I can casually use a ten-dollar word in a sentence, but I always ruin the effect by turning to H.E. and saying, “Did I just use that correctly?” Or I use phrases like time restraints, where H.E. must then tell me:

Time constraints are if you don’t have a lot of time.
Time restraints are when you’re strapped to a clock and can’t get loose.

Yet I score well on some tests, and I have no clue why. The disparities simply blow my mind.

Just yesterday, H.E. mentioned the same incongruity. He and I met online in a chat room, where we exchanged exciting new one-liners one after the other, each joke a play on the previous one. He told me I was quick-witted and fascinating; I just “got” everything immediately.

But now that we live together and communicate face to face? Wow. It takes me fifteen seconds to get his jokes sometimes. He’ll say something offhand, and it’ll be some multi-layered, cross-cultural play on words or something, some exceedingly clever laugh-out-loud kind of joke, but it’ll be ages before I realize it and burst out in laughter. He makes a game of it sometimes and counts the seconds before the light bulb comes on in my head.

“Ooh!” he’ll exclaim. “Twenty-one seconds that time!”

His theory on this particular phenomenon? My audio channel is busted. I’m quick when it comes to reading the printed words and typing. I’m slow when the words have to go through my special aural filter, where I translate from basic sounds to actual words, from one language to another, from English to April Speak. The output is no different; I stutter, falter, peter out, my voice uncertain as I try to say what I might otherwise brilliantly type, making Dan Quayle and George Bush sound like the two great orators of our time.

So there you have it. I am not that special, though my test results say otherwise. Don’t let my high scores fool you. I am really quite stupid.

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