In the interest of stimulating my mind, I decided this morning to start GRE prep. Not that I really plan on taking the GRE, but it’s never too early to start remembering stuff you forgot, which, in my case, means “anything involving numbers”.

I’ve never been good at math. I was all-honor-roll, all-the-time until word problems in the 6th grade brought me to my knees, yielding my very first C+. Things only got worse from there, with the introduction of advanced algebra, geometry, and trig. Of course, as they teach us from the time of our birth, math isn’t just numbers on a page – math is EVERYWHERE (which, to me, always sounded like a thinly veiled threat). This meant that in addition to sucking at math, I also sucked at chemistry, and, of course, it should go without saying that physics was one hugely embarassing excercise in futility. What I lacked in numerical comprehension I made up for in the literary arts, but math was always there, waiting, like a ghost in the night. The only reason I passed the compulsory math requirement in college (trig for idiots) was because the teached had given up any pretense of caring and actually ENCOURAGED us to cheat. Even with every exam open-book, I still barely eked out a 70 average and wound up taking the class as a pass/fail to preserve my GPA.

And now, just when I thought I’d outrun math for sure, now that I live in a world of user-friendly Excel spreadsheets and Quicken reports, now once again I’ve been confronted with the scourge of numbers. On my practice test this morning I got %13 correct. THIRTEEN PERCENT. And that was just “arithmetic”.

It’s a good thing I’m not really studying for the GRE, because with those kind of stats, I’d be pretty well fucked before I even started.

Completely unrelated: is there anything worse than bad coffee? I have this large coffee from whole foods and I swear to god it tastes like cat piss. I’m drinking a litterbox right now. Someone save me.