Remember Rubik's Cubes?

Her name was Lori Rawle. She was, at the time, the smartest 12-year-old I'd ever known. Heck, she's probably STILL the smartest 12-year-old I've ever known. You don't see too many 12-year-old geniuses in public school.

Lori was in my Language Arts class when Rubik's Cubes came out. While the rest of us were celebrating our accomplishment at just figuring out how to get one side the same color, Lori was staring it down, analyzing data and formulating theories. As I watched from across the room in that class we shared, she twisted and turned until finally that Rubik's Cube looked like this:

The rest of us finally figured out all we had to do was remove the stickers and reattach them. Of course, the stickers never went back on quite as cleanly as they'd been before. Some genius figured out you could take the cube completely apart and piece it back together, tricking everyone into thinking you'd solved the puzzle. Really, those people were just preparing themselves for futures as handymen.

That's my take on it anyway.

I finally gave up on Rubik's Cube and bought the pyramid:

It was no easier to solve, but it was easier to take apart, I figured out. I bought a book to tell me how to solve the pyramid puzzle but all I learned from that was that the word "orient" doesn't just apply to an area of the world. ("Orient the bottom right cube with the center right cube...")

I'm not sure what kind of brainpower it takes to solve one of those things, but I'm pretty sure NOT being able to solve it doesn't doom you to a life of failure. In fact, some of those fellow classmates that couldn't solve it went on to advanced degrees and had huge successes in their chosen fields. Still, I will forever be in awe of people like Lori Rawle who can take something as complex as a Rubik's Cube and work and analyze until they figure it out.