About Me

I hate numbers. I have hated numbers since, I am pretty confident, birth. As soon as I heard the doctors counting my fingers and toes, I could feel my ears bleeding. When mom said, “my one and only…” I thought I liked the number one…then Number Two, also known as Becky, came along. At the age of five, when I had to start counting the number of times Number Two kept knocking down my block tower, my hate for numbers just grew. In little league softball, when my dad was the coach of my team and made me throw 100 pitches a day to a square box drawn on our fence to “perfect my pitching,” I learned that counting down, rather than up, made the numbers go by faster, but were still a nuisance. In third grade, I started receiving actual letter grades rather than a check plus or minus, and when I realized each letter had a number value, you might as well have told me to never look at my report card again, because that is exactly what happened. Then my hate for numbers grew when, in seventh grade, I took my first algebra class. Mom and dad soon realized I was shunning the teacher, the grade and the numbers behind them, and hired a tutor. The flash cards helped, but when a person’s loathe for numbers is deep-seated and learned from years of associating numbers with unpleasant childhood experiences, there’s really no going back from that.

Denominators, coefficients, quadratic equations, greatest common factors, least common multiples, square roots, fractions, decimals, percentages and exponents…you might as well be speaking Japanese. Thank God for Blaise Pascal and the digital calculator. I’m not sure how I’d get along if I still had to use an Abacus.

Time is no friend to me either. Sundials I get. The hourglass is simple enough also. Numbers ordered in a clockwise circle? Preposterous. I prefer order. An hourglass is a model for order. It can’t freeze. It won’t spill over. It doesn’t need refilling. It runs at a steady rate whether the reservoir is full or nearly empty. Numbers? They go up, they go down, they go big, they go small, and they even stand on top of one another sometimes. I can’t think of anything more confusing.

I don’t really play well with numbers, and that’s why I created my own little spot on the web to keep them out. Aside from mathematicians, everyone is welcome!

Bridget Marie