This morning, I got off the subway at 8th street, New York's only stop that has mosaics underground proclaiming "New York University!" with happy tiled faces of students presumably milling about Washington Square. I was pretty occupied with hating the weather and all the humidity I thought had been mercifully chased away by September as I walked along towards Silver room 203... or, as I would later consider it, towards Uncertain Death.
You might know it by its more common name: Laboratory for "Natural Science I: How Things Work."
Yes, ladies, gentlemen... and others. (The GLBT at NYU is endlessly more popular than our baseball team. I'm totally cool with it if you're a dude-lady, or vice versa). Here's the deal: I'm taking Physics. I am taking Physics for the first time since, oh, I don't know... JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL. Do you know what else I did in junior year of high school? I went to prom. I got my driver's license. I wore hideous sequined flats and thought leggings under denim mini skirts were a good idea. I WORE POLO SHIRTS. I spent at least three days of the week playing the saxophone in the dingy high school band room and whispering rumors down the rows of instruments about who did what in the band room closet (hint: it was sexual.) In other words, I was approximately, like, three billion light years from where I am now, sitting in Brooklyn, about to finish my undergraduate degree. Yes, that is the last time I did physics.
So today, when I swung my patterned-tights-clad legs over a stool at a lab table, I felt more uncomfortable and unnatural than I have in the past three years of college. We all went around the room and introduced ourselves as our TA, a tall, bespectacled asian man with the same proclivity for social situations as a smooth piece of balsa wood, awkwardly flailed his hands around while he spoke and tried to comment on our choice of a "favorite performance" we'd seen in the past 5 years. Me: "Well, I saw Geoffrey Rush in "Exit the King." That was really awesome." Him: "Yeah, uhh, yeah totally I think you should all, uh, like see a musical in the city before you die." Uh huh. Exit the King is a piece of absurdist theatre by Eugene Ionesco. Not a musical. Not even close. One girl even had the audacity to name "A Walk to Remember" as her favorite movie, and NOT EVEN IRONICALLY. God, freshmen. When will they learn that at NYU, the right amount of pretentiousness is everything!
Sorry, I'm off topic. What I want to tell you, loyal readers, is about what happened next. After I eye-rolled my way through some really uninspired introductions. Somehow, amidst a sea of "uhhh"s and "yeah"s our TA managed to explain that todays lab was a math review.
Wait, math review?
Yes. A Review of Math. Before I further explain this, let me review the math that I have done since the days of high school:
- Tip calculations, as in "How much should I give this bartender after he gives me this ice cold brew?"
- Clothing sales, like "How much does this dress cost if it's 20% off and I also have a coupon and almost no money in my bank account?"
- Train schedules -- "If The Boyfriend is leaving at 3:53 and his train gets in 44 minutes after that, how long must I wait to blow dry my hair so that it is at peak performance when he walks in the door?"
Yup. This is the math I do in my every day life.
So, of course, when I turned the pages and saw such horrifying words as "logarithms!" and "sine! cosine! HYPOTENUSE!" I was overcome by a cold sweat and an overwhelming urge to vomit on the beakers beside me. For the past three years, I have been studying Neapolitan chords and ledes and interview tactics and Uta Hagen. For me, final assignments included papers that, I kid you not, were based less on what we wrote about than how honest we were about our feelings. I do music, I do writing. I do classes where we analyze text, where we conceptualize and shit.
You know what I don't do? I don't do logarithms.
Somehow, (and I don't know how), I survived. With the help of the freshman across from me I realized I am not as math-inept as I thought, only severely out of practice. "Oh yeah," I thought to myself, "Riiiiight, all I have to do is multiply both sides by 2" or whatever. I had to remind myself, rather quickly, that at some point I was taking calculus and knew what these words meant. "You're not an idiot," I assured myself. "You're just an artist now."
However, part of my writing this blog post is as a big, hearty, farewell. I can say with almost complete certainty that this class doesn't actually require most of what we did on that math review. This is very basic physics we're talking about, that requires more thinking and using common sense than actual hard core algebra. So, with that being said, I would like to say a "Smell ya later" (or, more appropriately, "Smell ya never!") to math of the more difficult, less useful kind. I will probably never again in my life do this stuff, this algebra stuff. I am on to bigger and better things that I actually enjoy and don't make me want to puke all over my TI-83. In fact, I never want to see another TI-83 again in my life, unless it is in the context of looking over the shoulder of my child one day as (s)he struggles with his or her own algebra homework. And even in that case, I hope our conversation goes something like this:
"Mooooom, I don't understand! Can you help me with my homework?"
"Sorry, kid. I don't do math."
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