David’s Ramblings

I got your package.

I’m eating ramen out of real bowls now.

Love,

David

After a nice refreshing week of work, I had to come back to the real world, where I go to class after sleeping in ’til noon. It was a hard transition, but I took it relatively well. It would have helped if I didn’t have to go to the worst class on my schedule right after I got back to Atlanta.

Proofs. What a horrible, horrible class. For those who have know idea what proofs is, let me try to give an example of what it’s like. Imagine you have an infinite amount of real numbers bigger than 0. Now imagine, we want to take the smallest number from that set, and say why it is the smallest.

To solve the problem, we look at it, and (now, stay with me here, as this is the tricky part) we decide to try to cut our own limbs off.

That’s how most of the problems go. Replace limbs with various body parts, cut with various painful verbs, and that’s basically proofs class. For example, this week we are learning to find characteristic polynomials by ripping our noses off.

Needless to say, It was somewhat harsh to get back to that. Especially knowing how badly I’d be failing that class after the last test. Thinking of the last test, I realized that he’d probably be handing back the scores that day. Not that I needed mine. Wouldn’t take a score to know I completely bombed it.

The class went on, we ripped off our noses and turned them into the teacher, and he started handing back the tests. He handed me mine and I looked inside. 91.

ÒHoly shit. No way. I must have got the wrong test,Ó I thought to myself. I looked at the cover. It had my name on it. I looked at the problems. They were in my handwriting. I looked through to see the individual scores per problem. They all added up.

It was then that I realized I had actually passed my test. The shock subsided, and I walked out of the classroom, feeling invincible.

It all seems almost worth it now, even though I’m short a few body parts I wish I wasn’t. I never really wanted kids anyway. For the record, I still don’t know how I got the score. For one problem I actually wrote as my answer: Òf is composite because of Homework #3Ó and got full credit. I didn’t even have to specify the problem number on that homework assignment for crying out loud!

(Also, it’s impossible for there to be a smallest number bigger than zero if you’re talking about all real numbers. You can always divide a decimal into a smaller decimal by dividing by two. )