It’s Monday Morning!!!!! Yaaaaay!!!!! Okay, honestly, I feel like a lot of you are not sharing my enthusiasm. I don’t blame you, it’s not your fault. You’re probably having a regular Monday like I usually have: you wake up tired, drag yourself out of bed, stumble through your ablutions, probably cut yourself shaving, remember that you forgot to do laundry over the weekend, so now you’re sniffing your way through the pile of last week’s work clothes, trying to find the least wrinkled and most olfactorily acceptable ones (because you have just enough work clothes for 1 week). Finally ready, you stumble off, bracing yourself for the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity that you know you’ll have to face throughout the day at your soul-crushing job.

I know your pain. That’s usually how it is for me. In fact, that’s how I thought today was going to be: just another freakishly horrible start to another run-of-the-mill week. My wife, the hard-working and sunnily optimistic Jess, woke me up at 6 a.m., in the morning! Let’s face it: That’s a terrible way to start any day, much less a Monday, and, just 6 hours into the new week, my spring was already sprung. Instead of springing out of bed, I oooooozed out, like chubby lava reluctant to leave it’s nice, warm, comfy volcano.

I was even less enthusiastic about this Monday morning than usual, because I had to take a math test. Well, technically, I didn’t have to take it until next Sunday, but I am trying to get ahead in my math class. You see, I suck at math. When I went back to school, I had to take a math placement test. The test confirmed what I had always known; I  am extraordinarily mathematically incompetent. I thought, “No big deal, I’m going to school to study English.” Ah, those were the days . . . I was young(er) . . . I was naive . . . I was wrong . . . so very, very wrong. It turns out that, even if you’re studying English, you still have to take math and science classes and foreign language classes.

Now, two and a half years later, I’ve bluffed my way through all of them – Environmental Science, Geology, and not one, but two, semesters of Spanish, getting A’s in all of them (which, quite frankly, gives me cause for concern regarding the quality of the education I’m getting). And when I say bluffed, I do mean bluffed. I’m pretty sure that I now speak less Spanish than I did at the start of the first semester, all I learned from Environmental Science is that we’re killing the planet in a multitude of ways, but that’s okay, because in Geology, I learned that the planet is trying to kill us in a number of ways, most of which involve lava and rocks.

That just leaves math; my old nemesis. My dad was amazing at math. He could do stuff in his head that I still can’t do, even with a calculator. Fractions, decimals, algebra, all that stuff, he seemed to be just naturally good at it. Sadly, the math gene apparently skips a generation, at least in the males. My sister is an accountant, so she is, presumably, pretty good at it, but neither I nor my brothers could do simple addition without a calculator. What can I say? We’re word guys.

Anyway, to make a long story truly endless, I’ve been working very hard to get ahead in math because I know that I suck at it. Also, because this is no ordinary math class. It’s called “Math for the Humanities”, and, as explained to me by numerous advisers, it’s a math class designed for mathematically-deficient English and History majors like me, to give us the math credits we need to graduate without over-taxing our math-challenged little minds. THEY LIED!!!!! I’ve had to spend the last two weeks converting Babylonian numbers, Mayan numbers, even Egyptian numbers into Hindu-Arabic (which is apparently what our numbers are called) numbers, and vice-versa. Ironically, the Egyptian numbers are the easiest, and they’re not even numbers, they’re pictures. A typical Egyptian number looks like: fish fish fish squiggly thing squiggly thing curleque curleque curleque hooky thing stick stick stick, but at least they give you a chart.

There’s also multiplying, dividing, adding, and subtracting in bases other than 10. I’m not going to even try to explain what that means (to be honest, I’m not even sure what it means, much less why it’s important to know how to do it). In high school, I was one of those kids who was always asking, “Why do I have to learn this? When am I ever going to need this?”, which is fairly common, even today. However, now, I’m 50 years old, and I know, excuse me, I KNOW I’m never going to need to do any of this!!!

Why else would I be an English major? If I was any good at math or science, I’d be studying them. There’s actual money to be made in math and science. My sister asked me what I’d be qualified to do after graduating with an English degree, and I told her, quite truthfully, “Be a stripper.” Then my wife, the very funny and needlessly cruel Jess, chimed in with, “Honey, you’re not qualified to do that either.”

So anyway, I’ve been struggling with this math stuff for two weeks now. I sit here at the computer, straining my brain, cursing at the computer, and talking myself through these math problems: “Okay . . . so 8 x 6 is 42 . . . ” while the much more mathematically capable Jess sits in the living room watching Pit Bulls and Parolee’s shouting, “No it’s not!” and giggling. Finally, last week, after going through the practice exercises for four hours, I felt like I was ready to take the test. I clicked on it (the whole class is on-line), and the computer said I couldn’t open the test until February 1st.

You probably heard me screaming.

So, this morning, February 1st, I ooooozed out of bed, took care of the critters, and sat down to take the test. I thought about going through the practice exercises again, and then realized that I just don’t care enough. So I clicked the thing, and took the test . . .

. . . And kicked it’s ass! (cue fanfare) That’s right! I killed it! I beat that thing like a rented mule! I showed it who’s boss! I got . . . wait for it . . . an 86%!!!!! Okay, I’ll wait a moment for you to stop laughing.

There, finished? No?

How about now?

Okay, that’s enough. Listen, 86% might not seem like much to crow about, but for me, it’s like . . . well, it’s like me almost qualifying to be an Olympic gymnast (those of you who know me and have heard me straining to tie my shoes even back when I was thin will know how surprising that would be).

What, you thought I was kidding about how badly I suck at math? If you’re a regular follower of this blog, then you know that I am, if anything, a master of the understatement, and that my humility is outshone only by my absolute honesty.

Anyway, not only did I experience an absolute and unqualified triumph over that horrible test, I also managed to get a load of laundry done, peruse the Facebook a little bit, fold and put away the laundry, and write this little gem. Not bad for a Monday morning. Of course, it’s only 11 a.m., and I still have to go to class, but I’m feeling uncharacteristically optimistic today.

How was your morning?