Infinite Discontinuity

The three words I've probably said the most in my life:

I hate math.

There's always been something in the numbers sprawled across the page that I find incredibly elusive. Always beyond my comprehension.
No matter how good a teacher or textbook may be, I still always fail to completely grasp it and understand it in the full, self-doubtless way I want to. Plus, it adds a lot of B's to my transcript...

But lately, I haven't hated it quite so much. I thought I would despise the obligatory PreCalc class I finally couldn't put off any longer. I don't. I'm not saying I enjoy it (I will never ever enjoy math, especially math with any variation of the word "calculus" in it).

But there's a certain certainty in the numbers that I kind of like. For example, some days during the week, I go to Precalc after a literature class. In this literature class, we discuss enormous topics above human comprehension and are expected to formulate articulate on-the-spot opinions about it. All this does is frustrate me.

While a quadratic equation also frustrates me, there's always the hope of conquering it. I know there's a definite answer and I know it's in the back of the book. There's always a method. Somebody has done the real discovering for you. All you have to do is learn how they did it and remember.

There's no answers to "what's the meaning of life?" no matter how many times my professor asks me. It truly is beyond my comprehension. You cannot graph humanity's inability to "approach the sublime" about the y-axis. We do search books for the answers, but even Thoreau, with all his footnotes, couldn't tell us. Nobody can.

At this age, this time in my life, there is nothing if not uncertainty. I may not have to provide my opinion on the meaning of life (excluding 9:30-10:50 on Mondays and Wednesdays) but I do have to decide what I want the meaning of my life to be. That's no easy task and I can't control a lot of what is going to happen, no matter how I much I may want to.

But I can control the x's and y's in my Precalc homework, ever certain and ever sure, clipped safely into my binder. I go into that class and when I leave, I decidedly know one more mathematical principle. I'm definitely not going to switch to a math major, but I can more greatly appreciate the steadfast consistency of numbers.