What I've Been Up To (An Update)

I've always had a complicated relationship with math. It started in the first grade.

I'd been aware of the joys of reading for several years (though most of the literature I consumed dealt with dinosaurs), but I had yet to be introduced to the world of arithmetic. I made it through kindergarten alright, when the only hurdle I had to overcome was being able to count from 1 to 100, but when they started throwing adding and subtracting into the mix I was overwhelmed.

I grasped addition fairly quickly (it is, after all, the cousin of counting), but subtraction alluded me. I remember very distinctly one of my first math assignments. It was a worksheet with a number of problems that I had to solve. (In my memory it was something like 25 questions, but my experience teaching second graders leads me to believe it was closer to 10).

It was a mix of addition and subtraction problems, which I understood. What I didn't understand, was how to subtract. So, in a moment of juvenile earnestness, I simply added every problem, confident that it was "close enough."

Shockingly, my first grade teacher, Ms. Dawn, didn't find my outside-the-box approach to mathematics as acceptable as I did, so she had a conversation with my mother about my struggles. In an attempt to aid my understanding, my parents sat down with me that night to work on math together.

My dad, an engineer and therefore a competent mathematician, explained to me that subtraction was just reverse addition, which turned out be exactly what I needed to make the concept click.

After that initial struggle, I traipsed ably through my elementary school curriculum. (It helped that most math at that level can be taught through the power of song.) I made straight-As and was in the gifted and talented program. I aced the TAAS in fourth grade (or I would have, had I not filled in the wrong bubble on one the scantron questions - I circled all the correct answers in my workbook).

My success continued in fifth grade, but fifth grade is also the time in one's life where you start to formulate a conception of yourself as an academic. I could certainly do math, I just didn't like math. I was a literary mind - a writer. So I naturally decided that math was not for me.

The sixth grade was where this newfound identity manifested itself into something with actual consequences. We started learning the most basic algebra - x + 4 = 5 and whatnot - and my struggles reemerged.

Come math time, my class was divided into groups. Those who understood the concepts got to stay in the classroom, while those who didn't had to retire to the desks in the hall and receive help from our student teacher.

Invariably, I would start in the classroom, become overwhelmed, and then request to go into the hall. After five or ten minutes, everything would click and I'd ask to be returned to the classroom.

I feel like I must have grasped the material, but I had decided that I was not good at math and therefore I became not good at math until I grew bored of being with the remedial students.

At my junior high, everyone was tracked. I was in the middle math track, and my teacher was an overweight woman who wore flowing purple pantsuits everyday - kind of like Stevie Nicks mixed with   Violet after she chewed Willy Wonka's three course gum. I remember that her name was Gigi, because she signed everything G^2 and was quite proud of that little pun.

Her room was always dark, illuminated only by the overhead projector. She kept a drawer of snacks in her room that she always fished in when we were working.

Looking back, I think she was probably depressed. She was always on the verge of crying, and did so every once in a while.

This, obviously, made her a target of 7th grade ridicule.

Anyway, she wasn't a terribly able math teacher. She'd been in the game for a long time and didn't seem to care whether her students learned or not.

I sloughed through her class alright, but there was no foundation for more advanced math really instilled in me - which didn't bother me in the slightest.

Eighth grade is where I had my first crisis of self. My teacher was a young guy just out of college. Our class didn't take him seriously and he returned the favor. I spent most of my math period vacillating between trying to distract the teacher and dicking around with my friends. This strategy didn't do much to facilitate any learning and, after one particularly inattentive six weeks, I took home my first and only C on my report card.

I don't know what my parents made of it. I think they were mostly flummoxed by their son. When I was 13 there were only two things I cared about - becoming a comedy writer and classic rock. I'm sure it was confusing to them when their son who, the year previous, had insisted on wearing Abercrombie and once loudly protested when his mother took him to Kohl's that he "didn't wear that kind of stuff anymore" had now switched to wearing exclusively black t-shirts from hot topic and Chuck Taylor's with ZOSO symbols drawn all over them.

(My life has been a procession of ill advised fashion decisions made in an effort to fit in. In 5th grade, when I wanted to be an athlete, I wore my baseball pullover everywhere. I also had a Braves hat from my little league days that I had frayed (because my cousin wore a frayed baseball cap) to the point that the fabric was not attached in the front and the plastic of the bill lay proudly exposed. I also insisted on wearing the hat into any body of water (natural or artificial) that I entered - this, too, was a signifier of my coolness. Seventh grade saw the aforementioned flirtation with proto-Jersey Shore apparel. Then there were the band shirts, which I defiantly wore during high school retreat of my freshman year to make sure that everyone at Trinity knew that I was cool and not bound by the crushing authority of their dress code. When I discovered girls in ninth grade I switched to American Apparel, which was the worst choice for me because all of their clothes are cut for boxy future frat-bros. When I bought Hot Fuss, I was determined to become indie-cool like Brandon Flowers and, in the most regrettable fashion decision of my life, I once wore a black tie over an army green Fender t-shirt to youth group. My senior year, I was introduced to the v-neck and my wardrobe has remained pretty consistent since then. It should also be noted that throughout all of these transitions I lacked both the fashion sense and a profligate enough mother to buy more than one or two pieces - so I just wore the same ensemble repeatedly, or some horrible mishmash of conflicting styles.)

To return to the narrative, my insistence on spending more time on learning the various guitars that Jimmy Page played on each album rather than on how to calculate the volume of a cylinder had rendered me utterly inept at math. I don't quite recall how this resolved itself. I have a vague memory of my parents and math teach and I having a conversation during the mandatory parent-teacher meetings where I pledged to focus more in class, which led to an uptick in my GPA.

The last time I succeeded in math was my freshman year of high school with Mrs. Wolcott (Connie, as I came to call her once I graduated and played World of Warcraft with her and her family for untold hours during the summer).

I spent my next two years with Dr. Hickey bumbling through algebra and pre-cal. I spent most of my time in Dr. Hickey's class curating CDs for us to listen to during tests (they were heavy on Journey and Sufjan Stevens) or listening to one of my more unsavory female classmates discuss her sexual misadventures with a sympathetic male classmate, who I imagine listened more out of prurient interest than anything approaching concern.

I took physics as a junior and did quite well, but it's only because our teacher was excellent. Even then, I failed to retain anything and in the week between the end of the semester and the final I had forgotten enough physics to make a 70 on the final and bring my average from an A to a B.

I renounced math entirely as a senior and instead took statistics, which is math for the unmotivated. The early days of the semester were spent watching videos on the importance of stats. Unfortunately for Dr. Hickey, one video discussed manatees at length and my friend Jeth and I latched onto them as our spirit animal and proceeded to draw them on everything. My other friend Donnie openly slept through class and the remainder of the students (all female) diligently worked with Dr. Hickey. I took the AP test at the end of the year and earned a gentleman's 2.

I took one college math course. It was called "Contemporary Math." It was taught by a bored TA and the most challenging thing we tackled was adding and subtracting fractions.

All of that to say, I'm trying to learn math again.

While visiting Mrs. Wolcott this Christmas, I flipped through one of my old math books and was shamed by my lack of knowledge. I've always been a bit sensitive about this deficiency in my learning - my roommates are engineers and my ignorance is a source of occasional humor - but I'd never thought to do anything about. The afternoon after visiting Mrs. Wolcott, I resolved to become more well rounded and ordered two of my high school textbooks off of Abebooks.

When they arrived in Austin, I promptly abandoned my commitment and they lay buried under third class mail on our dining room table.

When I graduated, I was fairly certain that I'd find a job within weeks. I had a great GPA and tons of internship and freelance experience. I sent my resume to twenty newspapers that had posted openings for sportswriters. I received exactly one reply and it was simply a courtesy response.

My dreams of being the next Dave Halberstam temporarily shelved, I started applying for jobs in the corporate communications world. I got one interview and I was almost certain that I would be hired. It's been three months since that meeting, so I assume I probably didn't get it.

My dad told me about an opening at his company in Dallas. I had a meeting with the head of the department and she was incredibly nice and the job sounded interesting, but I feel bad taking a job because of my father's influence. I know that this is how these things work, but it would still bother me.

In order to escape this fate, I've established a backup plan.

I've applied to UT's Arabic Flagship Summer Program in hopes of a) learning Arabic and b) setting myself up for graduate school. I have my eye on UT's dual-degree Middle Eastern Studies and Global Policy Studies master's program.

In order to get into the program, it's recommended that one have 6 hours of economics, 3 hours of stats and 3 hours of calc. In order to obtain this modest amount of quantitative knowledge, I've enrolled at Austin Community College, which is shockingly lax about basically everything. They needed no confirmation of my place of residence, nor my up-to-date immunization. I'm taking an online economics course and dominating it. I'm also taking stats through EdX, which is the big free online class thing that schools like MIT, Berkley, UT and others are doing. It's surprisingly difficult. I feel like I'm really learning something.

If all goes according to plan, I'll apply for grad school in the fall and enroll next August.

All of this meditating on the future has led me to realize something. Chiefly, that I never made any real effort of pursuing what I really want to do, of attacking an actual dream.

The first thing that I ever remember wanting to be (other than a paleontologist, which is decidedly less cool than Jurassic Park makes it appear) was a writer for Saturday Night Live. I read Live From New York when I was in the 7th grade and in the 8th grade I took drama for the first time (out of two times). I loved playing improv games and making up skits and generally acting a fool. It's around this time that I realized that I was a funny human being.

Somehow, my sense of humor hasn't fallen prey to my usual flights of hubris. It's always taken the backseat to more lofty aspirations like blogging about my feelings.  I've always felt that I was funny, but I never defined myself as the funny guy. It's not a skill that I've honed, but I'd like to change that.

I still plan on applying to grad school, but I'm also going to take my first shot at being an actual writer. I've already written a pilot and I'm working on refining it. Oddly enough, the humor has been the easiest part for me. The dialogue is what's hard. It's basically impossible to make written characters sound like actual human beings, which is fine if you're going for a deliberate aesthetic, but is tough when the characters are all channeling a particularly low-energy voice (my voice).

I plan to submit the finished script to Austin Film Fest and to Slamdance. I'm sure I'm being just spectacularly naive in this endeavor, but what else am I going to do? I'm a man with a dream and an insane amount of free time.