I am fairly certain that distribution requirements are a hazard to my wellbeing. I'm aware I'm attending a liberal arts school. I'm aware of the benefits to be reaped from a well-rounded sampling of academics. Give me history, sociology, classics, French, women's studies. But must I, the consummate English major, be subjected to the mortal perils of - dare I write the most heinous of all four letter words - math?
I honestly think it's a strain on my health. I see a string of numbers in a sequence I don't understand, and my brain screams with agony. If I don't get it an hour later, I know I'll never get it, and I break my calculator. I'm on a first-name basis with no less than four employees on the help line at Texas Instruments, and one even talked me through an algorithm.
So what's the point? I plan to receive a Bachelor of Arts next year, but I thought liberal arts implied a liberal amount of, um, bacheloring, in the arts. I guess I didn't read the fine print, and I have only myself to blame.
If it gives me grief, it's my own fault for not closely examining the distribution requirements before applying. But I applied, with the passing thought that perhaps I could petition to change the requirements.
Instead, I've spent my daily lobbying time to petition for better things, like a Joey stop directly in front of my apartment, and an Orangina fountain in the campus center to replace the useless water fountain they have now (think of it: it's a dose of carbonated vitamin C; scurvy would be virtually non-existent on campus).
It's a bit too late in the game for me to start, but if there are any freshmen out there who still have the momentum they started out with this September, feel free to take on the crusade I never started.
So now I am left to cope with two math credits. Two painful, excruciating math credits which taunt me as two maddening blips on an otherwise logical distribution sheet. I can do the natural and social sciences, pretending they're far removed from mathematics. It's possible to ignore figures mentioned by professors. I spell out the numbers, writing "fourteen" instead of "14."
Are numbers so evil, so life-threatening? Yes. To folks like me, there is no hope. I start to sweat every time I have to calculate a tip on the check while out to eat, and sometimes I get nervous when setting my digital alarm clock.
And it sneaks into subjects where you wouldn't expect it. Economics I can understand, but math has crept into other places with no warning. Any time a statistic is rattled off or a Venn diagram is sketched on the blackboard, I feel deceived by the professor for being misleading in the course description.
It's a little pipe dream of mine to create a society without numbers. It would be the shortest-lived society ever, but without numbers there would be no time, so it would be a relative success anyway. Uh-oh, relativity? This is too hard.
Logistics aside, down with math! Am I offending math majors and engineers? I'm not worried. I don't think math majors read. They don't need to.
They can look at a book, magazine, newspaper, or billboard, and merely by calculating its weight in their abnormally number-oriented minds, they can figure out how much ink and in what exact ratios form which words of the English language. Then they can calculate their probability of being interested in the piece, and the odds aren't good for this particular column.
