It all began with a psych evaluation, one that would figure out what was wrong with me and what was right. Turns out, my IQ is bordering genius level with regards to the right brain and borderline normal with regards to the left brain. About half of that of my right brain. Among other things, I was diagnosed with a learning disorder that has no name. Essentially, the doctor explained, I cannot sequence properly.
He learned this by placing six cards with various scenarios drawn on them. Man frying eggs, man in bed, man putting coat on, man walking out door, etc. When asked to put the cards in order, I did and explained how it worked. The doctor looked baffled. Eyes bulging in a way that expressed intense disbelief, he barked, “How the hell did you make it through life? I mean you’ve just been accepted to VASSAR! How the hell did you do that?” Throwing his hands upwards, as if to alert the Man Upstairs what a freak I was, he half chuckled and choked on his own dramatic facial expression before quickly refocusing on the very specialized testing process (one that oddly resembled a culmination of pre-school’s greatest hits: playing with blocks, tossing colored rings, drawing pictures of my mommy and daddy, etc.)
I thought the ordering of the cards made sense. Sometimes I have eggs before bed. Was that a crime? My learning disorder was so “severe” that I should have been handicapped at a young age. I’m guessing my freakishly smart right brain helped the left side along with training wheels and though my essays were sometimes a mess logically speaking, I made A’s and found myself enrolled in gifted programs and classes.
The first time I heard about David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I was spending some time with a ridiculously smart friend of mine. He was teaching undergraduates at the age of 17. Having skipped middle school completely, he enrolled in college at the tender age of 14. We sat in a white room scattered with mid-century furniture and he threw the 1,000+-page behemoth at the wall, leaving a proper dent. “I give up!” he said. “I’ve stopped and started this thing six times and I just don’t understand it.” And that was that.
Recently, while perusing the always wonderful tabled selections at The Strand, I lifted the hefty volume in my arms, opened it, and while I semi-discreetly sniffed the pages, I decided that I too, must try to read Infinite Jest. Hailed as an absolute masterpiece due to its impeccably tight writing (not ONE wasted word), length and composition (the rules of narrative definitely do not apply) by a former Claremont College professor and nationally ranked tennis player who hanged himself in 2008, the book needed to be read. I’m the kid who plowed through the works of William Shakespeare at age 11 and had to read Gone With the Wind because it was roughly 1,000 pages. So, natch, it had to be done. Reading Infinite Jest has become my February and (also maybe early March) proposition.
