Sitka or Bust: Commute The World

Nothing makes me feel more like an adult than realizing my math skills have been reduced dramatically over the course of time I haven’t used them and willfully purchasing a textbook to work on them. I actually got excited the day it came in the mail, like full on grinning from ear to ear and cracking it open immediately kind of excitement. I sat down for about an hour that first night, just working through the easy problems that I actually remembered how to do. It’s the ones further inside the book that I’m getting worried about.

Throughout school everyone said that we’d be using math constantly as an adult. I’ve talked to few people my own age who think that’s true, unless they use it for work. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I have a weird fascination with numbers but I seem to be using them all the time. Maybe not those weird letter numbers or square roots or coefficients, but I use math quite a bit and to take a shits and giggles math test that I pretty much failed means I need to get back in the game. And in the game I go.

I like numbers. They help me figure out whether or not my car is broken somehow, or how far its gonna get on a tank of gas, or how much money I’m going to be bleeding to get a new exhaust put in. Numbers get me to work (usually) on time, and they allow me to bake a loaf of bread without it having a runny middle or a blackened crust. They keep order in a world that sometimes can’t be orderly.

Sure, sometimes I get pissed at the numbers. Sometimes I wish my calculations were wrong or the decimal could be carried a different way, but no matter. Numbers can be counted on.

Sometimes I wish that I would remember the numbers more. For instance, it has been a whopping eight weeks and one day since I posted a blog. That is about seven weeks too long. I guess I got distracted by the other numbers in my life in the 57 days since that last post. There’s the average temperature on my porch I’ve been worried about; I take my plants’ health very seriously. There’s the height of their little sprouts as they poke out of the planters, and the angle that they tilt towards the sun. I watch the diameter of their stems and make sure to twist the vines around my railing only when they have started reaching out and clasping onto each other with a strength that shows their will to ascend.

I love the math that’s all around me and I love that I get to use it to find beauty and calm.