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I’ve mentioned before that I’m not exactly good at math, and if you’ve been reading here for a while you probably know I’m sometimes prone to over-exaggeration—although I swear to GOD the spider I found on our bathroom wall two nights ago was the size of a fucking Airstream, I actually saw visible biceps on each of its trillion horrifying legs—but I promise that my math deficiency is exactly as described, which is why I break out in a cold sweat when I hear the term “solve for X” (X? What? Now we’re involving letters? And all of a sudden this is a murder mystery and I have to be a detective and shit?).

It turns out that if you follow a career path that mostly has to do with words, you can get by with very few math skills. Sure, there will be the occasional moment when you’re having lunch with friends and the bill comes and you’ll have to throw yourself to the ground and fake a seizure to avoid enduring the humiliating public process of mentally calculating what you owe (pro tip: for authenticity, weakly push your wallet in someone’s direction and beg them to “just take some cash”, while simultaneously urinating in your pants), but overall I’ve had great success in avoiding math for many years now.

Let me clarify that it’s not that I hate math, although I certainly hated the busywork involved with it when I was a kid (I have particularly bad memories of endless chapters of long division problems, one after another, with the dreaded SHOW YOUR WORK command on every page); it’s really that I never learned math for shit. I barely know the basics, and anything approaching an algebraic concept has long been forgotten.

I have a long math-road ahead of me in school, obviously. I’ve thought about trying to self-learn enough to test into pre-algebra, but I think I’ll probably end up taking one of the “So You’re Kind of a Math Dipshit” courses that, on the flow chart of prerequisites, doesn’t even COUNT for anything other than allowing you entry into the next class, “So You’re An Average Math Dipshit, Unless You Don’t Know What ‘Average’ Means, In Which Case Go Take That Other Class Again For Chrissakes”.

I joke about this being one of the areas in which I am almost painfully stupid, but really, it’s never bothered me overmuch. Until last night, that is.

The nutrition class I’m taking (which is awesome, by the way, I’m really enjoying it so far. The instructor is a highly opinionated naturopathic doctor from Bastyr, so it’s interesting to get his take on things like the food pyramid [he hates it!], artificial sweeteners [you might as well be drinking DDT!], and anti-depressants [too many people are taking them! Try amino acid precursors first!]) has a weekly quiz, and we had our first one yesterday. I was buzzing through the answers, feeling good about how prepared I was, and then I got to this question:

Christopher’s lunch contains 121 grams of carbohydrates, 40 grams of protein, and 25 grams of fat. What percent of calories in this meal come from fat?

Uhhhhh. Uhhhhhhh.

Well, first of all, Christopher, that is a mighty big lunch you are eating, and I for one—

Okay wait, that’s not one of the answers. The answers are . . . oh hell, the answers are numbers. With one obnoxious “this answer is not possible to determine” choice just to fuck with me.

I got as far as I could, which was to multiply each nutrient count by their per-gram calorie count (4 for carbs and protein, 9 for fat, if you’re interested), then add the totals together, and then I had this to figure out:

What percent of 869 is 225?

And I had no. Idea. How to do that.

As it turned out, I was super lucky and of the answers provided I guessed the right one (26%), but damn, I felt like a total loser sitting there scribbling numbers on the test sheet, blowing eraser crumbs around, with absolutely no clue what I was doing. It doesn’t help that this class is made up of children, practically zygotes (no lie, I overheard one guy talking about the original Tron movie yesterday and he was all, “It’s not like I saw it when it came out, I mean, that was in the eighties“), and they’re all fresh from high school trig and biology and shit, and there I am in their midst, an aging sag-bellied mouthbreather lady who hasn’t been faced with a math question in FIFTEEN YEARS.

ANYWAY. So math. I need to work on that, sooner rather than later. Because goddamn, I am learning that I’m good at school now—like, for real, I’m a good student, you guys—and I want to ace this course despite the gaping numbers-shaped hole in my head.

The other day while we were all eating breakfast Dylan leaned to one side in his chair, grinned, and purposefully ripped a squeaky toddler-sized fart. Not to be outdone, Riley instantly demonstrated his newly-mastered skill of burping on command. Both children dissolved into hysterical laughter while JB beamed with pride.

It’s not like it wasn’t official before, but lately the dynamic in our household has become abundantly clear:

:::

So hey, I fixed the problem of not being home in time for dinner. It isn’t necessarily an ideal solution, but it’s working. It feels good to have gone through the process of identifying something that was important to me and taking the steps to change the situation (duh, right?), and reminds me that goals are nearly always worth whatever effort they take.

Now if I can just get my family to stop off-gassing at the dinner table, but something tells me I’ve signed up for a lifetime sausage party.

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