Thursday, April 03, 2008

My number One insecurity

On a friendly blog there was this fun little thing to do. Simple really, all you have to do is type in your blog address and it will give you your blog's readability level. I didn't even think about the consequences it would have on my ego for days on end but hey look something fun and shiny, let's do it.

And so here is my results..

blog readability test

Movie Reviews




The second I saw it I laughed. Then I decided to hide the evidence, that no one would ever know my dirty little secret of my Nancy Drew of a blog.

I then decided to move on and pretend that this had never happened except that it did and I knew it and I am not one to let things go. Next thing I know I am doing the dishes dissecting this bloggy thing thinking what in my blog makes me a junior high school level. I hated junior high. Did it take into account the fact that I put in my blog address incorrectly at first, did it grade my typing skills before it checked my grammar? And it took like two seconds, how can check grammar that fast? What the heck is it checking? The amount of times I used the word like? I don't even use emoticons, shouldn't that go for my favor? What about sarcasm and irony, a computer can't check implied intent in two seconds, can it? Is it too many kids stories where I used what they said verbatim? Are you telling me that blogging about my kids is actually dragging down my blog IQ? I knew it, dang those halflings.

Then I thought about this post and mounting my defense to show how actually smart I really am and then putting down in list form all the smarty-pants things I really do. But lets get to the heart of the matter. Appearing to anyone at anytime to be anything less than intelligent is my biggest insecurity. Once in a while I know that I am a little empty-headed when it comes to my calendar but that doesn't bother me at all. Appearing to be laid-back, not a problem. The thought of anyone thinking that I am not intelligent is intolerable.

It started from childhood. The youngest of six children, I have been playing catch-up for as long as I can remember. In my house, grades were the ultimate example of your intelligence. It was compounded by an early marriage, early kids with a very young face accompanied with very impertinent remarks. And the postponement of my higher-education.

I feel like I have been compensating for my lack of college degree ever since. Especially when you are in the baby phase and all anyone talks about it mind-numbing baby things, and where did you meet your husband chatter? Don't get me wrong, I can dissect a pregnancy by trimesters with the best of them, tells you exactly how old each of my children were when they finally slept through the night and can continue ad nauseum. However, there are times when I just want to talk politics, literature, anything else if not to prove that I am intelligent than just to prove that I am an adult.

I didn't write this to get any comments about that I am smart, really. I am sending this out there to show one of my failings that I am trying to overcome. This isn't one of those things like a skinny woman who complains about being fat so she will get compliments on being pretty and thin. I am not stupid, this I know. I am smart. My insecurity is solely wrapped up in people not perceiving me as intelligent. On the other side of that coin, I also have problems with trying not to seem like a know-it-all either. I walk a wonderful tight-rope of insecurities.

6 comments:

SuperCoolMom said...

I love it! I went around checking everyone else's blog IQ too becaues I just knew that all my brilliant blogfriends were genius'. I still can't figure out what that thing looks at. I'm still sayin' it's all about syllable count.

BTW, I think you're my only blogfriend who analyzes articles from Science News or Nat'l Geographic or whatever. Higher thinking is completely subjective and cannot be graded! (especially by a blog thing)

Jessica Haddox said...

I'm totally with you on the intelligence perception hangup. I loved being in school. I would love to go back. But probably the biggest reason to go is just so that I can say that I did, and proove that I'm smart! I'd probably still be a stay at home mom even with a degree. So yeah, this insecurity thing... not crazy at all.

Abbey said...

If it makes you feel better, my blogger IQ was worse!

The Schooley's said...

Hey Cristtin- this is Alli Schooley. I got your blog off of Denay's. Hope it is ok. Man I miss your sense of humor. I almost peed my pants when I read the blog about the big poo. Serioulsy, I would've ran too!!

Super Stevie said...

Okay, first of all, I have to say that my MySpace page gets a College level (postgrad) IQ result ;)

Secondly, my blog gets a high school level. Suckage.

Thirdly, Katie's MySpace gets a postgrad college level, and her blog a middle school level.

Fourthly, as a web developer, I want to know what code they are running on ASP (Windows based server, i.e. VERY SLOW) to get results in about 2 seconds. That amount of time to render on the page using AJAX means they are probably grabbing a random result from an array of options (elementary, middle, high, college-undergrad, college-postgrad, etc) and then storing that in the the database with the blog URL.

I also put in a few really technical blogs and only got results of middle school back as well. Oh, and btw, the two MySpace pages I checked are both "private" so all it can see is our profile image, screen name, and a few personal details.

Hopefully that explains a _little_ bit of the possible code behind it. If they are storing it to a database then when you enter that URL again they will always give consistent results back so it isn't purely "random" even though it may actually be just random.

Oh and just one more FYI, the UofU comes back as Middle School, while my alma mater (http://www.umuc.edu) comes back as High School (joy). Although, my MIT degree comes back as college level - postgrad (http://www.aiuonline.edu).

Just a few more random statistics about the lovely system that I thought you might want for your analysis. The moral of the story, don't read too much into it because it's all results generated from some function / class a guy like me made up when he was bored one day just to rile people ;) <-- use of emoticon on purpose.

Oh and one last thing. I would apologize about my blog not loading for you, but that must mean you are using Internet Explorer. In order for me to consider you among my "smart" friends I must insist that you switch to a more safe and secure browser (such as Firefox - http://www.getfirefox.com, or Safari - http://www.apple.com/safari). In the meantime, if you give me another week or two, I'm working on upgrading my blog to the most recent version of WordPress as well as creating a custom theme from scratch that should work with IE6 and IE7 browsers as well as real browsers (see Firefox and Safari above as well as Opera).

Thanks for commenting about Paisley btw. We have tons of photos of her on our Flickr site fyi: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenloveskatie/

Keep up the great blogging. I read them all even if I don't comment :P

Haddorkus said...

Steve, I'll take everything you said as truth and just accept that it was random and not personal. We'll just have to let time tell if I actually let myself let it go.

To show my web and computer ignorance though, i-tunes recently downloaded safari for me and until I just read your comment I had no idea what it was. I never wouldn't figured out that it was an internet browser, that is what it is, right. Well, I pretty sure that is what it is. It is how I am on the internet right now. I will have to do some research on this thing and then see if I should just ditch internet explorer. Thanks for the tip.