Probably Why I Hate Math

Saturday at work, I was trying to figure up the trust allowance for a preneed contract and it just wasn't coming out right. I was frustrated and has been my habit, if something is particularly difficult and I can't figure it out I'll give up on it for a while.

I've done it when I've been embalming and things aren't going quite right, in high school with stupid physics problems I couldn't work out and in band when I couldn't get certain parts of the music. The reasons behind my temporary quitting are for another rambling post, but not today! Today, I'm writing about math.

I found something else to do while I procrastinated what I really should have been doing and I thought about all the trouble math has given me throughout my life thus far. Perhaps we should put on Jimmy Buffett's "Math Sucks" while we reflect?

In college, I took the lowest math that counts- College Algebra 1 or something like that, because my ACT scores didn't put me in a higher class. Math was always my lowest score on the ACT every time I took it. Physics and chemistry sucked in high school because you need Algebra to do those kinds of science. In sixth grade, I was bored and read books during math until it got me in trouble. Guess I thought since I wasn't going to get it anyway there was no point in paying attention. In fifth grade, my blue-haired teacher made us work out problems on the board in front of everyone. This was ok if you knew what you were doing and got it right, but if you got it wrong...... She made several of us cry with her yelling.

I kept thinking and went back in my brain as far as I could. I couldn't remember any math in kindergarten or first grade, my earliest mathematical memory was second grade- learning to line the numbers up neatly and add or subtract them.

I thought about third grade and the sheets of 100 math problems we worked out as fast as we could. All that was hunky-dory til we started multiplication. I don't remember the explanation of multiplying exactly. I can't remember the 1 times or even the 2 times. I believe we started with the sevens.

Sevens! You've got to be out of your mind! (Somebody was.)

I remember all the other kids yelling out random numbers that I couldn't figure out how they were coming up with- 7! 14! 21! 28! until they got up to around 100.

I just gave up right there. That's where it started. I didn't understand and they ran off and left me. I remember several big red F's on math tests after that.

Sidenote: once, this third grade teacher got mad about one of the boys reading a Garfield book when he shouldn't have been so she snatched it from him and frisbeed it across the room, right over the top of my head! I saw this lady two years ago in a restaurant and nearly broke my neck trying to avoid her. Carry on!

Fourth grade was no better. I made it through multiplication and then they wanted to start fractions! Somehow I passed all these and while I'll still break out in a sweat over numbers sometimes, I've learned that math can be useful and even fun. Like in the kitchen cooking or paying bills- two of my favorite domestic things to do (no joke!)

Sunday, I figured out my trust allowance perfectly.

This morning my boss said, "So what are you going to talk about today?"

Excuse me?

I got dragged into going with him to UA to give a presentation on the funeral business and what we do to the students in a social work class. It went well, I only had to talk just a few minutes about myself and my background and answer some questions while my boss did most the rest of the 'splaining. I made a few jokes, they laughed, I was terribly nervous and I know my face was red, but it felt good.

It felt great to be a "professional" and be able to explain myself to a group of people who were hanging on every word. I felt accomplished and proud to be able to tell my boss that I was glad I'd graduated and didn't miss school at all.

Maybe I can't write like an English major or give a speech like my boss, but...... Who cares?

And Now, A Break From Boring House Pictures!

High school literature makes kids emo.

Remember how we always had to figure out the symbolism in the books we read?
"Dead trees mean this, green grass means this, such and such means this."

Some of those kids took that stuff to heart and ran with it.
That's why the emo-rage is running rampant among teenagers these days.

Why couldn't they be happy like the kids from the 60's and 70's minus the dope and stuff?

(This has been a public service announcement on What's Wrong With America?!
Part One can be found here.)

I miss school today. 
Ever since that 96 I've decided that I really can do better.
I want to do better.
I want to go back to school and learn something else and make these super good grades Dee Dee always said I should be making.
I need a project.
A goal.
I'm goalless right now.
Maybe this feeling will improve after Boots and I finally start working on the house.
That should be a big enough project for me, for a while.

The majority of blogs I read are sad.
Like this one.
Very sad.
Or, this one.
But he's getting happier.

Great writers are usually always tortured souls, or at least that's how it seems.
Hemingway, Dickens, van Gogh (so maybe he didn't write, tortured soul nonetheless), these people that make it big in the blog world are usually tortured by something, except for The Pioneer Woman, who is exceptionally happy.
Misery loves company, right?

I feel like I'm in a funk today.
I feel purposeless.
I feel lazy.
I want to do something, something great and wonderful!

I guess I'll go brainstorm and develop a plan.
TTFN!

Pictures and Tiny Details

Calf on a trailer.

Flowers in a tire.

Dew.

Me and Boots at graduation.

I'm graduating today and doing graduation things with Boots and my family.
Enjoy this picture while I'm gone.

The End!

The time has come to rejoice and put on a flat hat!
I...ahem!...I have finally finally FINALLY passed both of my Boards!
Aaaaaaaaaaand, now sing the "Hallelujia" chorus!
Now!
I passed.
I can't believe it.
This has been one of the absolute happiest days of my life thus far.
I now have free time!
What shall I do first?
I've got a stack of books knee-high begging me to read them since now I can; guiltfree I might add.
I've got wedding planning that will procede full steam ahead!
A not-so new camera that I've been waiting to play with.
I want to exercise.
Maybe yoga?
I want to cook!
And bake!
I want to clean even!
Today has been a good day.

P.S. Dear Boots,
Thanks for your patience.
You must be a saint.

Blabbers

I don't have a lot to say since it's still pretty early and not much has happened yet.

1) I almost ran over not one, but two, cats this morning on my way to school.
A sign, perhaps?

2) Today, today, is the proclaimed unofficial last day of organized class as I/we know it complete with graduation practice and I'm sure lots of picture taking.
I think back on my last graduation practice a mere three years ago, yes, I am a baby, and  of how these will soon be people I'll probably never see again and remember somewhat fondly in pictures. 
I hope.

3) Speaking of pictures...
Yesterday I received my second year book from this place.
There's only two pictures of me in the whole 200 page complete color thing and in both of them my hair is a flat wreck.
Not a flat wreck, but a flat. wreck.
Awful, just awful.
Couldn't someone have warned me?!

I took the first part of my Boards yesterday.
I passed it.
Half my burden is lifted.

Today Was a Good Day, I Didn't Have to Use My AK

(Yeah, who sings that song?)

The past two days at school have been probably the best all year.
I feel like I've just about reached the epiphany Ms. D's been talking about.
The stress level was at a minimum despite the fact our main man in the instruction department is having some major health problems.

I scheduled my boards today.
Both parts.
A lee-tle scary.
I chewed all my fingernails off within five minutes.
Good thing they grow back.
But Ms. D swears that I'm going to pass and her enthusiam has bolstered my confidence.
I am going to pass.
It finally dawned on me last night that I am going to pass.
:D

The weather was gorgeous today, in between rain showers, at least.

I scored 2 out of 3 on Turtle Kickin'.
Turtle Kickin' is something I've been doing for a few years because I have this thing about people running over turtles.
Turtles are slow cuz those shells are heavy (I think its because they have big brains).
Squirrels and birds and stuff like that are fast and crazy, if they get run over that's their business, but turtles I feel for.
Don't run over a turtle.
I might have to kick you in the shins.
It will hurt.

Tomorrow is opening day of the 45 day window for me to take my boards.
I'm pretty nervous.

Origami Swans

I didn't take this picture, I Binged it.

When I was in the third grade there was a meeting just for the girls of the class which resulted in me bringing home a note on pink paper and telling my mama that I had to be in Girl Scouts.
My mama paid the required $7 to join (was it really just seven dollars?) and schlepped me to all the meetings.

We got the big fat handbook (maybe that's what the 7 bucks was for) and started trying to earn badges right away.
There were so many things that just weren't feasible to do in my mind.
Like spend a day in a soup kitchen.
I'm pretty sure there was no soup kitchen in my hometown.
Or learn to make a campfire.
Why did I need to know how to do that when my daddy made all the fires when we went camping?

We sold cookies, of course, and I'm pretty sure that this was the beginning of my disdain for all things fund-raiserish.
I really dislike fund-raisers.
So I did a few things, I don't remember what, out of the book and got a few badges for my mom to sew on my bright green vest.

The best thing about Girl Scouts was the trip we took to the Children's Hands On Museum.
It is what the name says it is, a museum for kids to touch everything.
I don't think places like this are very conducive to teaching kids the right way to attend a real museum, but whatever, it was fun.
The exhibit was on China and everything was decorated all China-ish right down to the paper doors and the sandboxes filled with rice.
We arranged flowers on green metal frogs and I thought that was pretty lame.
Maybe that's where my flower complex stemmed (haha!) from.

I quit Girl Scouts a few months later (I forget why) and have since then resolved myself to learning things that help you out in life that don't earn you badges.
I still can't sew on a button properly though.

Some time after the Girl Scout era, a year or so maybe, I was looking through my old handbook and I came across a page with instructions and pictures on how to make an origami swan.
There was a small origami swan with orange tips stuck in the crease of the page.
My mama made the swan just for the fun of it when I was in Girl Scouts and left it in the book.
The orange tips were dots she had drawn on the paper as linear guides.

I forgot about the origami swan and Girl Scouts for a long time.
I don't even know where that book is now but I think my vest is still in a closet at my dad's house.

In my second semester of mortuary college I had to take Restorative Art.
"Had to take" and not "took" because it was not a fun class or an elective.

Maybe you're not familiar with Restorative Art.
To put it simply, RA, as we liked to call it, is the way of taking something ugly and messed up and making it pretty and whole again, usually the face.

We had to learn all the bones of the skull and face, all the muscles of the face, as well as all the facial wrinkles, make a head with wax to match a picture of someone (living, not dead!), and learn lots of crap about color and what matches with what and what doesn't match with what.

Our first test covered the bones, muscles, and wrinkles.
We were all pretty stressed and trying really hard to make a good grade because there were only two tests in RA besides the final.

I'm usually a pretty fast test taker so most of the time I finish second.
(I have a thing about finishing first.  But that's another story.)
I finished my test and asked to go to the bathroom.

On my way back to the classroom, the sunlight was shining through the glass doors so bright, it made the waxed linoleum look like a mirror.
I saw a tiny shadow in the sun-mirror, the shadow of an origami swan!
I bent down to pick the origami swan up, but it wasn't a swan, just a crumpled up ball of paper with words scrawled all over it.
I unfolded a paper and my eyes read the answers to questions that were on the test I had just finished.

Right when I stood back up, a classmate of mine walked out of the room and was standing in front of me.
I didn't want her to think that it was my cheatsheet and get me in trouble when it was my wild imagination that found it in the first place!

"Look what I found," and I shoved it at her.

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked me after she read it.

I decided that the only thing I could do was give it to our teacher, what she chose to do after that was up to her, not me.

I did not know how much grief an innocent origami swan could get me.
My classmates were furious that I had ruined the afternoon by getting us all an hour long lecture about cheating and put the teacher in a bad mood by turning in some dummy's cheatsheet.
I told myself that a smart cheat wouldn't have dropped it and if they were smart they wouldn't have had to cheat in the first place.
Or if they had any scruples.
I had scruples.
That's why I turned it in.

Turning in the origami swan/cheatsheet and sitting through the Cheating Gripe Fest of '08 did not even the playing field between us at all.
After that episode, the cheaters had to figure out new ways to get the right answers.
Our teacher was wizened to their game although she never did figure out who the cheat sheet belonged to.

I have my theories but, theories are just that--theories.

I haven't seen an origami swan since then.

Here's what we started with.

Here's what I made.

I paid for my Boards yesterday.
The Boards.
It's T minus two weeks before I take the first part.
I am so scared.
That is the hardest $400 I have ever spent.
Any other time I've ever spent $400 it's been on my car.
But this time, the pressure is on me.
I have to pass.
I can't afford to fail.

Enough with the panic.

In other world news,
Today is my two year anniversary with my job.
Yay.

No, Thanks

Of all the many things in this world that I'm glad I'm not, a school bus driver ranks pretty high up there on the list.
I have so many bad memories of riding the bus.
I fear that if for some reason bus driving was my occupation, I would only acquire more bad memories and probably lose more of my hair, forget the steady paycheck.

I always sat in the back of the bus, with my great-aunt So-and-So who rode the bus because a) she didn't have a drivers license and b) she worked in the school lunchroom so why not catch a ride going in the same direction?
Great-aunt So-and-So got off the bus before I did and this proved to be a problem on several occasions--one in particular stands out.
One day we had a substitute driver.
I was in kindergarten and was pretty short at that age (the growth spurt that made all the boys say I was on steroids didn't happen until sixth grade.)
After Great-aunt So-and-So got off the bus that afternoon I just kinda chilled back in my seat.
Being meek and mostly mild in life isn't an overnight development, you start out that way.
When it came time for my stop the substitute bus driver didn't stop.
I didn't jump up and run for the front exit, I just sat there and watched the world go by out of my little rectangle window until the very end of the route when the substitute bus driver (his name was Joe) finally caught sight of my little short self and said, "Hey!  Where you 'sposed to get off et?"
I don't remember what I said, but he was probably pretty agitated about having to take me back to my house, where he'd already been.
My mama was running up the drive way with the cordless phone in her hand, crying and upset because she didn't know where her baby had been!
Haha!
That was pretty funny.

One time this older scary high school girl flicked a lighter in my face and told me she was going to set my hair on fire.
My mama had a fit about that.
That was pretty scary.

The same girl laughed at my baby doll I took for show-and-tell, saying it was "a yellow baby."
Psshh......
So mean.

Kindergarten was pretty traumatic as far as bus riding goes but it only got worse after that.
Every year somebody would puke.
Gross.
Every year there'd be a massive fight.
Intense.
There was the lady who made us late to school every Monday because the bus would go dead over the weekend.
Why she didn't plan accordingly after this turned into a habit, I don't know.
The bus drivers hated their jobs.
They had to have hated their jobs.
They were always in bad moods and probably closer to the ends of their ropes than any of us realized.
The kids were horrible.
I'd like to think that I was pretty compliant.

The buses were always nasty.
Kids sticking their food wrappers between the seats, spilling their drinks on that black floor.
Trash and crumbs everywhere, mold growing on the seats from sitting shut up during the humid summer months.

When I was in the band I had to carry my trombone back and forth to school, via the school bus of course.
We got assigned seats one year and I got stuck sitting on the hump.
On the inside.
That brass beast rode between my fifteen year old knees and ankles, pressed up against my nose while the little third grader that got on after me was oh, so, comfortable.

I wouldn't wish bus driving on my worst enemy and I hope that my kids are fortunate enough to not have to ride the bus.
It might be a gas-saver but dang, its traumatic.

Life Is One Big Comedy Act

Driving 80 miles to school one way is a very long way indeed and it leads to excessive amounts of boredom indeed.
Indeed.
Yesterday morning I saw an eighteen wheeler stopped on side of the road with a haybale up against the nose of the truck.
(I really don't know what you call that, but it looks like a nose.)
And half a mile later there were several murdered scattered and run over haybales all over the highway.
Oh, the carnage.
Approximately 54 miles later, I saw for the first time ever a real LIVE skunk.

I have never seen a LIVE skunk.
I keep typing LIVE because all the skunks (skinks? what's the plural here?) I've ever seen have been dead.
And then, since it was raining, I almost hydroplaned on a huge water puddle which made me remember the crazy dream I had last night.

I took my little beat-up car (Dear Car, I love you.  Rachel) to the shop to get the oil changed.
The little old lady that worked there hopped in my car and started to drive it around the building where the mechanics were.
She came back inside right away, yelling, "We can't fix your car!  Its blowing coal!"
Coal, yes, coal, was blowing out of the air conditioner vents and landing in the lady's lap.
They refused to fix my car or even change the oil, saying that I was going to have to buy a new one because this one was obviously broken.

No legal stimulents this morning.
Some dork dear, sweet friend shattered the coffee pot right when I walked in the door.
No, it wasn't my fault, I heard the distruction before I even rounded the corner.
Chemistry was really boring after Ms. D went over the info we needed to know for our impending scholatic murdering fest test.
It was like a sleeping pill.
My head was bobbing and I kept waiting for Ms. D to yell at me to wake up and pay attention but she never did.
I have no clue what she talked about when she got to atomic numbers and protons and neutrons and such as that.
Soon we got a break and were allowed to vainly attempt to wake ourselves up by methods that didn't include coffee.
The unemployment bus showed up at school shortly afterwards, and we all had to troop over to the exercise building (in the rain) to be subjected to the "getting a job" nonsense, complete with a map we had to fill out with initials from booths we'd visited (stupid) so we could when a doorprize (lame).
Some lady in a very purple shirt tried to take me into the mock interview room but I told her I wasn't having no part in that because I already had a job, a good job that I work 45 hours at.
She really didn't seem satisfied with my insistence, but she decided to just let it go when I told her I really wasn't going to do it when she told me I didn't have to.
Great.
Then she tried to put me in the line that required me to answer a question about whether I had children at home under the age of 18.
I look like I'm twelve years old.
Really, lady?
Children under 18?
When I answered negatory she decided that line wasn't for me either.
Of course.
And then I got stuck in a line listening to a lady talk about a CD and a piece of paper but my ears perked up when she got to the part about templates for resumes and cover letters being included on the CD.
About once a year, I'll have to roam around Google, hunting for templates to make your own resume, at which point I get severely aggravated and curse the Internet people.
I decided that this was the one good thing about the whole unemployment bus parking outside the athletic building and that this magical CD was worth the water half-way up my jeans.
And the candy I got when I filled out the survey about my "experience" at the "job center."
Some dude One of my classmates birthday is today and some other dude his dad brought a King Cake for us to celebrate with eat.

Excellent.
I had never heard of a King Cake before.
Its some Mardi Gras thing apparently, complete with green and gold and purple glitter and a teeny-tiny baby that you have to be very careful not to swallow.

 

King Cake was good.

*NOTICE!!  THESE ARE NOT MY ORIGINAL PHOTOS, I BORROWED THESE FROM GOOGLE.*