I’d like to think I have a bit of smarts. That, for the most part, I can follow a conversation and perhaps even contribute intelligently. But there are a lot of things I don’t understand, but think I should. Because other people do. Maybe most people.
Football – I don’t get it. I don’t know what any player is doing on the field at any point (if it’s even called a field). I get that they are heading towards one end. I do watch hockey after all. But beyond that… nothing. And it’s not like I haven’t tried. I’ve spent a lot of Sundays on the couch – ummm, recovering- and found it be very soothing. Perhaps because I don’t get it and can just zone out. And I’ve seen a lot of football movies. Little Giants? Totally appealed to the side of me that wished I was a tomboy sporty type ( I wasn’t – more of the read a book in the shade type). Generic high school football movie from the late 90s-early 2000s? Saw them all. The Blind Side? We watch that movie every time it’s on TV and it irks me that Sandra Bullock knows more about football than me. And I’ve learned a lot from movies. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days? Did it in nine. How to Train Your Dragon? I trained two. How to follow a sport as we explain it to you step by step? Totally blank. Sigh.
Math – Oh sure, I can add, subtract and multiply a bit. I can even resize a picture proportionally using the handy dandy solve for X we learned in grade, ummm, long long time ago. But math, like mathematician math – what the heck? I don’t get it at all, and why you’d even want to. But then I met my husband. And oh the joy when I realized he loved to read as much as I did. And we read a bit of the same stuff, but there were some definite discrepancies. I should have know there was something going on when he came home with Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem. Huh? And then Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra. What the what? And it was at that moment I realized – I don’t understand math.
There’s more, but I’ll save it for another post. But let’s just say it has to do with where Germany is.
OMG. He was CURIOUS about Fermat?
OMG. I might have been semi-responsible for that. . .
Lecture 42: The Taniyama Shimura conjecture, the 3-ness of the universe and analogues and digitals things mixed up with diaphantine equations. Ellipses and modularity forever. Infinite regressions and all the fun stuff.
Did he start spouting that stuff. It goes through his head I know.
Semi-responsible? I full on blame you.