Battlestar Mathematica

For nearly two decades I have struggled. Struggled against a faceless, shapeless entity. It has, at times, taken various guises. It's been a long blond-haired woman, a short blond-haired woman, a dark-haired man, a gray-haired man. This entity has been tall, short, skinny, old, and young. Throughout its transformations one thing has remained a constant. It's unbridled, consuming hatred for me. The enemy I speak of can subtract, it can negate, it can add, it can multiply and divide at will. This is a battle of epic proportions. Math is its name and dividing me into equal parts is its game.

When I was a wee lass Math was just another subject to endure as I waited for the end of the school day. I treated it with ambivalence and that was the first of many mistakes. I didn't realize that at the age of 30, as I tried to finish my degree, it would come back with a vengeance.

In 8th grade I remember the first blow Math dealt me. It was a sucker punch to the gut. Miss T. (those who were there will remember this particular mistress of pain) had called on me to complete a problem on the board. Nervously I approached the inky blackness. The streaks of white on the board took on the forms of the Tolkien Ring-wraiths. The room was spinning as I shakily grasped the chalk in my awkwardly pubescent fingers. I was wholly unprepared for this battle and Math knew it. Pun intended...it had my number. It ended quickly. I failed and returned to my seat. The walk of shame.

The second encounter with my eternally-bound nemesis occurred but a year later. Ninth grade saw me put into what Math's minions termed as pre-algebra. This time Math sent someone who would finish the job. Mrs. F's reputation preceded her. She was known for anything from yelling at students to throwing textbooks. I prepared as best as I could. I suited up and rode in. What I endured that year I still cannot talk about. To this day I can only recall images of a snarling face and the screams, the screams still echo in my mind.

Now I find myself facing an old enemy. It seems determined to break me. It is one of about 5 classes I need until I can consider myself a holder of an English (with an emphasis in writing) degree. Math has evolved yet again into a middle-aged man from a country of unknown origins. Sometimes he sounds Arabic and sometimes I sense a mixture of Pakistani and Russian. It matters not where he comes from but that he too will try to layeth the smacketh down on me. It will try to square my root and hold my feet to the fire of truth tables. Math may have won the battles but this time I am determined to win the war.

Thirty is Emphatically Not the New Twenty.

This is my attempt at blogging. I've pondered starting an actual website but I thought I'd begin with this and see where it goes. I used to blog quite frequently on my Myspace page. But no one is really on that site anymore and the format was a bit rudimentary for my tastes. Yes my nose is sticking up in the air as I type that.

So let's begin, shall we? I recently turned 30. I truly believed that nothing would change except my driver's license on my birthday (and that I'd acquire copious amounts of presents) but I was gravely mistaken. I thought I'd wake up the next morning and still want to play World of Warcraft, I thought my memory would be the same, I thought I wouldn't feel older at all. I know some will accuse me of hyperbole but the weeks after my birthday have been plagued with memory problems, cracking knees, and I've hardly played WoW at all. I can't remember the last time I sat down and did the daily quests or even ran a dungeon. I've actually contemplated starting crossword puzzles and learning how to knit. But for all the MMORPG's I'm not playing I do have a lovely flower garden to show for it.

What troubles me is the expediency of the aging process. It didn't help my mental state when my Grandma told me that at 30 your body stops producing enough calcium. She recommended that I take two 500 mg tablets of calcium per day. I'm sure more recommendations will be forthcoming now that I seem to have crossed the threshold into what I call preventative death measures (pdm). It's all about maintenance now. Making sure I don't end up with chalk bones and broken limbs.

As for my memory. There is a noticeable lag in my brain. I used to banter and bicker quite effectively. Now there is a significant pause in my responses. I can feel the neurons exerting themselves to form into some sort of answer. I'm wondering if it's this bad at 30 what will I be like at 40? Will minutes pass instead of seconds? Will people look at me and wonder why I'm not speaking? Will they just leave me standing there, in the rain (rain fits the imagery of this moment), and hours later I find the words to say?

I was assured by a good friend of mine (who had turned 30 about two months before me) that I had nothing to worry about. In fact I have textual evidence to support this assertion. I literally have a text from her that says, "30 is great". I carried those words around in my little heart, they bolstered me, they made me get out of bed in the morning. The reality, however, falls far short of great. Tony the Tiger would give it just a grrr. No additional letters or an exclamation point. Just grrr. Thirty, quite frankly, sucks ass. Yes, I said it. It sucks ass. I think there has been a whole campaign waged to make people feel like 30 is the new 20. If I followed the money trail it'd probably lead back to the companies who make money off of Appletinis. Don't ask me why, I don't have it all worked out yet. It has something to do with the emergence of the Appletini coinciding with the 30 is the new 20 b.s.

As I sit here with my bones flaking off into my body, worrying that bone shards will push through my skin at night, causing me to bleed to death, I recall better times. Days without two calcium pills a day, spending endless hours at online gaming and retorting at the speed of sound. Indeed, 30 is not the new 20, it is the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship April, welcome to my blog.