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Note my previous entry and my amazing lack of basic math skills. I can add, really. I know that being somewhere from three in the afternoon one day to seven at night the next does not thirty six hours make.
Man, I used to be really good at mental math. Really, I was! When I was on the [dork alert] academic challenge team in my high school [end dork alert], I was the mental math go-to gal. I could add. I could subtract. I could multiply. I could divide. I could figure out the exact total of purchases, including tax, while waiting in line to pay. And I would do it, thinking for some reason that handing the cashier exact change before s/he had a chance to say the amount out loud would somehow get me that Cool Card I'd always wanted. Sigh.
Anyway, then I started working at Hollywood Video, and all my amazing abilities (and amazing they were! at least in hindsight) just up and vanished. Standing there day after day, using the computerized till thing as we'd been taught, my skills atrophied. If someone handed me three pennies to round out their change after I had entered a different bill amount into the computer, I would completely freeze up and stare blankly at the computer. These were not my finest moments.
I feel I should sue Hollywood Video for Alienation of Math Abilities! I think I have a case. Dammit. Perhaps I can start up those exercises I did as a kid and get da skillz back. That would involve extensive time with my grandfather, though.
See, when I was a little girl, my grandfather would pick me and my brother up after school a couple days a week so we could hang out at his house instead of the after school place. This was cool, as we got to eat rainbow sherbet in the afternoon and watch cartoons. Good times. The only bad part of the experience was the time spent en route and immediately post-arrival at the house.
First off, my grandfather, a very religious man, was more than a little appalled by the fact that his grandchildren were on a freight train to Hell because his son and daughter in law had turned out to be very lapsed Catholics. Jimmy and I went to mass rarely, something my grandfather would try to make up for on these afternoons. We would start out every car trip with a prayer medley, and to this day I can't just say one of these prayers -- the Our Father goes right into the Hail Mary, which takes a detour past a couple short verses to hit upon the Prayer of St. Francis of Assissi, etc. I still remember those but, like the alphabet, have a hard time starting in the middle. Many a sunny trip was spent engaging in these spiritual activities, and I used to bop my head around so that it looked like we were singing along to something on the radio.
Anyway, post-religous tutorial, we would start in on the mental math. Oh, the fun, sitting in the hot beige Taurus, doing math problem after math problem -- "Okay, Jessica, go: Ten times six plus thirteen minus twenty-eight times three minus fifty six plus ten!" Good times. I developed da skillz.
Somehow I doubt I'll be jumping in the Taurus again to retrieve them.
Man, I used to be really good at mental math. Really, I was! When I was on the [dork alert] academic challenge team in my high school [end dork alert], I was the mental math go-to gal. I could add. I could subtract. I could multiply. I could divide. I could figure out the exact total of purchases, including tax, while waiting in line to pay. And I would do it, thinking for some reason that handing the cashier exact change before s/he had a chance to say the amount out loud would somehow get me that Cool Card I'd always wanted. Sigh.
Anyway, then I started working at Hollywood Video, and all my amazing abilities (and amazing they were! at least in hindsight) just up and vanished. Standing there day after day, using the computerized till thing as we'd been taught, my skills atrophied. If someone handed me three pennies to round out their change after I had entered a different bill amount into the computer, I would completely freeze up and stare blankly at the computer. These were not my finest moments.
I feel I should sue Hollywood Video for Alienation of Math Abilities! I think I have a case. Dammit. Perhaps I can start up those exercises I did as a kid and get da skillz back. That would involve extensive time with my grandfather, though.
See, when I was a little girl, my grandfather would pick me and my brother up after school a couple days a week so we could hang out at his house instead of the after school place. This was cool, as we got to eat rainbow sherbet in the afternoon and watch cartoons. Good times. The only bad part of the experience was the time spent en route and immediately post-arrival at the house.
First off, my grandfather, a very religious man, was more than a little appalled by the fact that his grandchildren were on a freight train to Hell because his son and daughter in law had turned out to be very lapsed Catholics. Jimmy and I went to mass rarely, something my grandfather would try to make up for on these afternoons. We would start out every car trip with a prayer medley, and to this day I can't just say one of these prayers -- the Our Father goes right into the Hail Mary, which takes a detour past a couple short verses to hit upon the Prayer of St. Francis of Assissi, etc. I still remember those but, like the alphabet, have a hard time starting in the middle. Many a sunny trip was spent engaging in these spiritual activities, and I used to bop my head around so that it looked like we were singing along to something on the radio.
Anyway, post-religous tutorial, we would start in on the mental math. Oh, the fun, sitting in the hot beige Taurus, doing math problem after math problem -- "Okay, Jessica, go: Ten times six plus thirteen minus twenty-eight times three minus fifty six plus ten!" Good times. I developed da skillz.
Somehow I doubt I'll be jumping in the Taurus again to retrieve them.
