Oh, the cleverness of-- you?

Soooooooo. (Man, I've been abusing this icon. I should remake it so the text is not so blurry. >_>)

What does one do, when one has a character that is much smarter than oneself to write? I mean, I was chatting with sjen last night, and the topic of writing "intelligent" characters came up -- people like River Tam, or L, or any number of fictional geniuses out there, including those in ones own personal headspace. I like to think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person: I'm at a good school, I have a high GPA in a difficult major, and I can pick up concepts fairly quickly (provided that they also have some animation to them; flapping my arms in order to try and demonstrate how I see telomeres + heterochromatin = not exactly my brightest-looking moment, but hey). On the other hand, I'm not a genius, and I'm far from it; there are levels of intelligence and understanding of things that I can pick at from a far distance, but will never come anywhere close to cracking.

But the thing is, intelligent characters are cool. Especially for the geek in me -- I wouldn't necessarily want to hang OUT with the frighteningly intelligent dry-witted fellow whose ennui could drown the entire world, BUT. But, I think it'd be kind of cool to at least work on a project with him, know what I'm saying?

(Of course, the "logical" answer is probably to research and research and just know what I'm talking about, but if we're talking about one of those natural geniuses, LIKE River, to whom everything comes to natural as breathing, that's ... a lot of stuff. How does one cope with the sheer breadth of useless knowledge that a lot of really smart people seem to know and spout off? Honestly, now.)

... and, if I really wanted to be smart, I'd finish my homework now. Yes, I think I'll do that. >____>

BUT HAY HAPI BIRFDEI miss_arel! Kick that test's ass! :D