Apathy Plus Shame Equals Sarcasm

Okay:

Here's an embarrassing factoid...I suck at math.

A lot of you who read this blog are artists as well, and I can hear you all with my special Internet Telepathy saying to yourselves, "me too."

But trust me; you don't suck at math like I suck at math.

I still count on my fingers. I don't know the multiplication table past 2s (except, of course, for 5s, 7s and 11s, which all have those clever little patterns). I have to work out two digit addition and subtraction problems on a sheet of paper and I'm still not quite sure how long division works.

I failed math every year in high school and had to retake it every summer.

Luckily, I was right when I imagined that there was no way in hell I'd ever need to use any of this shit in the real world on a regular basis.

I can remember my sixth grade teacher, Mrs. Baker, saying, "When you go into a store and buy something, you want to be able to figure out your change so they won't cheat you."

Everything this woman taught us was based in some misanthropic pretense. She once strongly cautioned us against having drinks in other people's homes for fear of being poisoned. "If it's not in a closed can, I simply tell them I don't care for any," she said.

There was a lot of paranoia surrounding the poisoning of children in the eighties. There were after-school specials and assemblies and what have you. Remember those little green mad face stickers with the poison control hotline number? Now we've got terrorism and Internet predators. Our parents had communists and venereal disease.

I'm happy to say that neither I nor anyone I know has ever been poisoned by an open beverage or Halloween candy. I also have not learned to tabulate my change in my head. And I'd like to assume that no one has ever tried to cheat me.

Math-wise, things started going downhill for me after we finished the unit on subtraction, which I estimate to be sometime in the first grade. Multiplication perplexed me. My teacher described it as, "fast addition."

I remember thinking to myself, "Why is everyone always in a rush about everything?"

It was a slippery slope from there. But the coup de grace was your friend and mine...long division.

I hated long division like it was a person.

I knew it was going to be trouble from the start. And, as I mentioned before, I never had that breakthrough that I was expecting. I fully anticipated a light turning on one day. And I would be, like, "Oh, now I get it." But that never happened. My mother even got me a tutor, but nothing seemed to work.

Come to think of it, this is when I started acting out in school. Around the time long division showed up. The most annoying thing about long division was how long it stuck around. It seemed like we spent an entire school year working on it. It was like an in-grown pubic hair, a sort of private pain.

By the time they started introducing letters and whatnot, all that x and y business, I had completely tuned out. I felt in math class much like the geek must feel in gym class. Only, I also hated gym. School just started to suck in general after a while. It was painful.

I disguised my pain by becoming the class clown, a title I would hold indefinitely. Even in grad school.

So then, after ten years of hiding my secret shame, my daughter came home last night with math homework.

Fucking fractions.

If there's anything I hate anywhere near as much as long division, it is fucking fractions. Why am I concerning myself with numbers less than one? How is this practically useful if I'm not baking a cake? And even if I'm baking a cake, they've got those measuring cups and spoons and shit and so you don't need to know any of this shit, now do you?

Remember when the teacher used to try to use pizzas to explain fractions? If Johnny eats one eighth of the pizza and Bobby eats one fourth and blah blah blah. Who gives a shit as long as I get a fucking slice? There's no math to that. Just give me my fucking slice of pizza, you prick!

The irony of all is that my first teaching assignment was middle school math. I needed a job and they needed a math teacher. "Can you teach math?" the principal asked during the interview.

"Lady," I said confidently, "I can teach anything."

I had to concentrate in order not to laugh.

Anyway.

I tried to help her with it, but I just ended up confusing myself. I was trying to fold a sheet of paper into sixths but I started off all wrong and tried to start over and ended up balling the paper up and throwing it on the ground.

My daughter patted me on the back. "Daddy," she said. "It's not as complicated as you're trying to make it out to be. The big number goes on the bottom and the small number gets topsies."


Thanks for reading.

GOBAMA!

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Factoid: I was elected class clown my senior year in high school. And I went to art school, so that means I was a total ass!