I can only conclude that I'm an idiot

I have come to the inescapable conclusion that I'm stupid.

When I was in school, I was one of those kids that never did any homework but aced tests without trying, and people used to be shocked how well I did on standardized tests and told me I had enormous potential, and how smart I was.

But they were wrong; I was a god damn moron. Just completely fucking retarded when it came to pretty much anything but taking tests.

I can avoid some of the blame for my gross incompetence by the fact that I was raised by a certifiable lunatic, so I didn't develop too many life skills that would have helped me get through life. I mean, I didn't learn to properly wipe my own ass until the summer after 8th grade (hint: keep wiping until the paper comes out clean, even if it takes and entire fucking roll to get there).

Anyway, enough about my childhood traumas. We all had them, blah blah blah, woe is me, waaaaah, etc. Here's how I realized that I must be stupid.

When I was 19, I was fresh from a brutal clusterfuck of a year long enlistment in the military, honorably discharged but even more psychologically screwed up than when I went in. I had a doctor. Went in for a sinus infection once, and she asked my age. I told her I was nineteen, and she said "Ohhhh, just a baby" all condescending like. It really pissed me off. I knew I was 19, but I had already been through quite a lot of shit in my life, and this bitch was barely out of residency, so who was she to call me a baby. Yeah, I know she was just joking around, but I was an uptight touchy prick back then. Anyway, here's the problem: she was right.

When I turned 20, not much happened. I looked back on my last year of teenage life, and realized I had made a lot of stupid decisions. Not life altering ones, just a string of dumb decisions and misconceptions about stuff. So my 20 year old self concluded that my 19 year old self was a dumbass.

I turned 21, and saw the string of stupid decisions I had made when I was 20, and thought "Wow, that was retarded. I'm so much wiser now than I was back then."

I turned 22, looked back on my 21st year of life, took inventory of all of my fuckups, and thought "well, I wasn't as moronic as I was when I was 19 or 20, but I was still pretty ignorant and foolish. I'm in a much better place now.

I turned 23, took stock of my array of personal failures, and thought "well, it wasn't as bad as 21 or 22, but still pretty bad. I'm doing much better now.

I turned 24, asessed my level of fail from age 23, and then I started to, shall we say, notice a distinct pattern. I'm hoping you can spot it too.

So now I'm well into my 30's, and this pattern has predictably replicated itself each and every year since. I look back on the previous year, and think "what the fuck did I do all that for". I mean, now and then I manage to do something that doesn't suck, so it's not all bad, but there's plenty of stupid mixed in there.

So 32 is creeping up on me rather quickly now, and I suspect that I will look back on my 31st year of life and think "wow, that was dumb."

The only logical conclusion here is that I will consistently do stupid thing throughout my entire life, but won't realize it until much later. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

I will admit that as I get older, I have managed to improve my stupid to reasonable ratio every year, but it's such a small incremental improvement that I'd have to be 150 years old before I stopped being a dolt. And I suspect this improvement rate isn't linear, so I'm doomed to suffer at my own hands for... well, the rest of my life.

Depressing, but at least I'm aware of what the future holds for me: A string of bad decisions punctuated by occassional successes.

...

Is that too dark a note to end an entry on? Ah, fuck it, good enough for today.