Animalculus

I... don't like math.

This is the rallying cry for every arts major in the world, but I'm simply no good at it. Add it. I'm no good at adding it.

Computation does not suit me.

While others excel at arithmetic, I struggle. While some may revel in the meticulous deduction and intricate calculation of advanced algebraic conundrums, I falter. I gasp and strain with every forced answer, every guessed solution.

I'm attending regularly, and with considerable dread, an introductory Calculus course at the old alma mater, and it is torture. Simply put, it is being enthroned upon a red-hot stickle bush. It is the sysyphian gulch, and I am trapped therein. I only refer to Calculus with a capitalized first letter, not out of respect, necessarily, but for the same reason that I might capitalize the name of some great and terrible demigod, some Babylonian demon whose good graces, were they to exist, I would want to find myself in. I show Calculus respect lest it ever transubstatiate into a personification of its convoluted and largely inapplicable existence and wreak horrendous vengeance upon a populace confounded.

Which wouldn't really bother me were the entire thing not so damned futile. I will never, not in my life, need to know Calculus. I just won't. I understand that there are applications to Calculus, and I respect that there are. What I do not enjoy is, in a class of zero math majors, not one, we are still subjected to how, in our potential lives as advanced physicists, we will be employing Calculus daily! You see? So you need to learn this now! it's not like CPR, it's not like understanding how to suck out snake venom. You're never going to have to calculate how fast a grenade is coming at you at any given point in its trajectory. Even if you had all the pertinent figures at hand, and fast enough, the only important thing you need to know is do you get out of the area or not? I will help you with this problem:

Yes.

Yet, my professor continues to ensure us that we will have practical application for these eldritch and dark mathematics. Madam, I am a film major. I don't even need to know what numbers are, let alone how to make them, on fire, jump through hoops. Worst-case scenario, I will need to reference the number-specific scrims that go over lights, which range from the complicated designations of anything from 2 to 1/2.

Or I could just refer to them by their standardized color-coded system. Really, her only hope is that all the Best Boys in the world are struck colorblind and dyslexic in one fell swoop. And that I'd quickly need to calculate how fast they were going at the exact moment it happened. Or something.

Near the start of the semester, she wrote something on the board. She diagrammed some living abomination. The whiteboard seemed to buckle and creak underneath the markings as they attempted to warp reality into something hideous and squamous. I remember seeing what she wrote, and my mind attempting madly to bend around it, to not see what my eyes were undoubtedly reporting. I remember gazing upon my own demise. This brief calculation, this expanding definition, was the antithesis of life. It was horror, and I knew at that moment that, somehow, I was looking into the gaping maw of hell. I will attempt, here, to recreate what I have seen:


I am convinced that, should you stare at it for long enough, you will see how you will die.

So I need to get through this class someway. Somehow. Unfortunately for me, mathematics is one of the few things that I am unable to fake my way through. There is no wiggle room in the stark and unfeeling walls of arithmetic, and I am forced to attend office hours, get tutoring, even bother my one and only friend who actually understands thing one of this stuff. All credit to my true homedoggo, though, he had it all right off the top of his head, years after the fact. The man cannot be held back. I only wish I had his brain, that I might eat it, and become powerful.

This class is what we in the business call a "GPA Enema," meaning it is going to clean the fucker out with little incident. Considering I want to get into a PhD program, do not have a ton of extra-curriculars, and am applying for a major that is to math what a baseball is to a bumblebee, I am going to be extremely upset if it is this singular course that is the one to take me down.

Hey, did you know that the derivative of any function is the slope of the tangent to that function at a given point, and that the prime of sinw is cosine?!

Neither does anyone else.

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My next post will be my 100th. I don't know what, if anything, to make of that.