If there’s one thing I’ve learned to avoid in life, it’s math.
Perhaps it’s my Southern heritage that leaves me numerically impaired. Or maybe I just don’t like math and that’s that. I come from a family of lawyers where 2+2 does not necessarily, under certain conditions, have to equal what is sometimes, in the aforementioned situation, considered 4.
But we Southerners have a long tradition as agrarian people, literary people, fighting people, and hospitable people. But math people? No.
In Alabama, the sign may say 70 mph, but do we go 70 mph? Are we such a hurry that we have to go 90-to-nothin’? If we were, wouldn’t we talk faster? I think it’s the math.
And I’m afraid to bring this up, but have you noticed that the math portion of our children’s SAT scores are ugh, well, low? I think that test is biased. I mean, who can answer this question: If Jane has four marbles and Billy has two marbles, and Jill is in a Northbound train traveling 82 mph, how long did it take for Mark to do his income tax return?
Huh?
I don’t understand math people. And this makes for a lopsided equation because the inverse is usually true. Now, I have no idea what I just said, but my math-oriented friends say that I’ve just made some sort of joke, so I’m going to go with it.
When I meet new people, I often ask them for a joke that I can relay back the good people of Andalusia. My new math friends gave me this joke:
What’s big, gray, and proves the unaccountability of the reals? Cantor’s Diagonal Elephant!
Is it just me, or is that joke, er, not funny? Have you ever met a funny math person? Me neither.
Of course, in these modern times, math does everything for us: music, games, cash machines, rocket ships, and computers are all derivatives of math.
My science/technology/math comprehension ends, I mean stops dead, at the lever and pulley. I know how that stuff works. I can fix a lever and a pulley. You want someone to explain an inclined plane to you? I’m your man. Don’t get the science of a crowbar? I’ll set you straight. Combustion I understand. Steam power I understand.
But ask me to balance the cosign of 237 with pie or whatever they call that thingy in a circle, and I’m in trouble.
Microwaves, electricity, and magnets? Whoee baby, you lost me.
I’m an English major. I do creative writing. I do Renaissance literature (and thankfully, Shakespeare and company did very little math, aside from “2B or not 2B, that is the equation!”).
What I’m saying Andalusia, is that sure, math people may kinda be anti-social, unfunny, weirdoes wearing pocket protectors and arguing over Hector’s Pythagorean discourse model, but we need them. We want them! We are glad to have them around (when something breaks)!
—Morgan Murphy