this story originally appeared in the philippine daily inquirer on November 19, 1998.
Count me in. I can be your ally against this big, bad world of numbers. If you hate math and all that it stands for, stand up and be counted. Yes, I’m mad at math. And I’m mad at everything associated with it: numbers, math teachers, statistics, geometry, calculus, calculators, counting, abacus, mathematicians, units of measurement, rulers, pluses and minuses and innumerable other things.
Oddly, the feeling is mutual. Math is also mad at me. I have hated math for as long as I can remember. I hated it so much that I wouldn’t listen to nursery rhymes and childhood stories involving numbers. Who wants to count little Indians from one to ten and back? Who needs one-two to buckle a shoe or three-four to shut the door? Pardon me, but I would hate to sing a song of sixpence and find four and twenty blackbirds baked in my pie!
I couldn’t care less what happened to Snow White’s seven dwarfs when she met her prince, and in my opinion, the 40 characters in Ali Baba’s tale should have been in jail because they are thieves. I hated the guts of Sesame Street’s Dracula not because of his fangs but because he’s so illiterate that all he does is count (May his lightning strike him!).
If you ask me, I’d rather stay home than splurge my hard-earned salary on a trip around the world in 80 days. I long for the days when math was represented by the three apples, one banana or five balls I had to draw on a blank space on my test paper. Math then, like life, was simpler. Simple computation were done via “My dear Aunt Sally” just as musical notes came in fat-boy-eats-apple-during-good-climate mnemonics.
In high school, an elective course taught me practical mathematics: from solving the interest of a money deposited in a bank (whatever “principal times rate times time” means) to basic accounting (A-one, A-two, A-three…). This course was called Consumers Math, and true enough, it consumed me. During bonfire night, a week before graduation when we were instructed to let go of our bad memories by throwing to the fire everything we wanted to forget, I didn’t only burn my math textbook, I also shouted “Long Live Mathematics!”
College was worse. I became “mathophobic.” I was no longer the person I was, but a mere statistic represented by my student number: 86-30411. I liked my weird philosophy teacher who, after drinking three bottles of beer, asked me, “What is reality?” I also liked my political science professor who, in line with our lesson about colonial mentality, asked me if I had ever done sex “in an American way.” But I never liked my math teacher who, every semester, welcomed me by saying, “Oh, so it’s you again!” and then kept insisting for the nth time that the equation “zero plus zero equals zero” can be proven by theorems and postulates. All I knew was that if I had nothing and you had nothing, whether we put them together or not, we still would end up with nothing. God forbid, but I wished all mathematical formulas were as easy to memorize as my viands at the dormitory. And to think that grades were given in numbers (yup, you guessed it, mine were 4’s and 5’s).
In graduate school, I had to take statistics! My test scores were so “mean” it couldn’t even reach the median. Thus when my professor assured me that the “drop-the-lowest rule” applied (meaning, grades would be computed based on our higher scores), I panicked. I immediately dropped the subject before he dropped the lowest–me. Even now, everywhere I turn I still have to face numbers and count and die. I wake up everyday (after eight hours of sleep), do my routine exercises by the numbers, eat three basic meals, take so-and-so milligrams of food supplement, budget my money, wait in a bank until my number is called, ad infinitum. But who cares?
I don’t count my change after I purchase anything (I won’t know the difference anyway even if I do). And of course, I always take my pills before I sleep lest I will be forced to count sheep. My wrath for math is so strong I can even write a song about it. But since I’m not a musician, too, borrowing the tune of Oscar the Grouch’s favorite “I Love Trash” for my “I Hate Math” song is a splendid idea.
Yes, my repulsion for Math is equivalent to the value of a mathematical pi: no one will never see its end. But then I remember that even the Almighty is a mathematical mystery. One God in three divine persons, how can that be? Like the Holy Trinity, I believe with some amount of conviction that math equations should be left that way–unsolved, unanswered. With religion in mind, I bluffed my way through all these by convincing myself that “math” is nothing but “a Roman Catholic thervith.”
My Dad used to insist that math is essential. When you grow up you’ll understand, he said. I grew up, became a writer, and I still cannot understand. In this aspect, my Dad, who is now buried six feet under, died a lonely man. Well, I’m a dreamer, too (in math class, I sleep) and I dream of really putting up an anti-math society. I imagine that you and our allies will sign up, and our society will gather a huge membership. There will be politicians, musicians, illiterates, grammarians, abandoned youth and streetchildren, and like the sand and the stars, they’ll be too many to be counted and … whoa, wait a minute, you mean there’ll be counting? Huh? Oh. Uh-oh. Seems like there is no escaping this mad mathematical world. Be my ally. Count me out.
