I like mathy stuff.
Dirt and I used to give each other two three digit numbers and multiply them in our heads. What was really fun was when we would explain the way we arrived at our answers.
I stunk at math all the way through my first year of college (it played a huge part in why I came home after that first year, that and soccer and drugs.) I didn’t particularly appreciate math when I was taking Civil Engineering just before meeting Dirt, and it took a lot of my brain power when I was taking Nursing just after I met Dirt.
But then when I went back to school after my first baby was born because my mother insisted that I needed to increase my worth to the world through more education, I came across my Logic teacher’s concept of math and I was no longer in the dark. I began to love math.
I think it is funny and you will too Dear Reader, when I tell you that he said, “a math equation is just a sentence, you just have to make it say something.”
The fog lifted immediately and I turned instantly into a math whiz. Isn’t that hilarious Dear Reader? My mother would never have thought that a concept like that would have ever helped me since she was well aware that I could not write a decent sentence to save my life. (I caused her to use more red ink that all her students combined).
The joke in my circle of study friends, with whom I swapped papers for advice and corrections, was that Lanny didn’t think that there was anything too terribly wrong with the sentence; “Throw the cow, over the fence, some hay.”
Not unlike the very very different way that Dirt and I would choose to multiply large numbers, it was just another way of getting to the same conclusion, the once hungry cow is now fed. It is catchy, makes the hearer stop and take note, giggle if they choose, when their brain flies to quickly along and they are heaving a cow up and over. But it is not what is being said grammatically, so it is not my fault that they now have back strain.
And check out the beauty of eight words but two commas! With that sort of word to comma ratio I could write for ever without ever seeing the terrible period. I hate periods, but I love commas, you understand don’t you Dear Reader?
Since I became comfortable with math, I have embraced all that previously vexed me, I no longer shunned the likes of three point one four. Pi. What is the date on Saturday Dear Reader? That’s correct, it is Pi day! Say it, don’t read it and you have got a day devoted to luscious fillings captured within light flaky pastry.
Ahh by the way, I know Dear Reader that you have a question that is burning in your brain. You are dying to know who was faster at the multiplication game, Dirt or I or me. Do you think I would have told that story if I were not the faster of the two? But then, even though he is a mechanic extraordinaire, and he is intrigued by them, he is not gravitated to puzzles, like I am. I am a puzzle junkie. I see puzzles every where, they just cannot require spelling.
On Sunday mornings Dirt rolls over and changes our radio station to NPR, he does this in his sleep with ease because the radio is always playing, he cannot sleep without it. Eventually we gain conscience and begin to listen for the Puzzle Man” I’m pretty stinking good unless it is one of his ridiculous anagram puzzles, that is not a puzzle it is a spelling test. And as my good friend and personal humble-er Kathy knows I am the world’s worst speller. Okay that is an exaggeration, I have seen toddlers pick up a pencil and not be able to spell as well as I can.
In fact she just recently helped me finally learn how to spell a word that unknown to me I have been spelling incorrectly all these many years even with the aid of lovely crippling liberating spell check. Why? Because it is nearly a homophone. The difference in pronunciation is so subtle that it is hardly noticeable. Because of homophones I am a homophobe.
Tomorrow is a big work day at the farm, I bought lots of stuff to do.
God created math you know, we have just discovered what was already there.
