Chuting range

Real fuzzy numbers

I was always in the higher math group in elementary school, dangling off the bottom half of the class but always making the cut.  In high school I continued to take the higher math classes and be the kid that was woefully bereft of natural mathematical capability. 

I asked that Ms. Szwast keep the equation on the overhead juuuuuust one more minute so that I could be sure I had TOTALLY absorbed that story problem and be ultra prepared for her after-school study session – and also capable of completing the extra practice problems offered in my thoroughly highlighted geometry book.

            Bottom line: I’m okay at math. 

However, I am somehow incapable of digesting large numbers when it comes to distance, money or weight. 

            I am one of a family of golfers, yet I simply cannot judge distance.  When it comes to clubbing myself, mile markers and yardage books mean nothing to me.  I cannot tell you if a pin is 65 or 150 yards away.  I just feel what club I need.  This often leads to gross underestimation of distance; the ball lofting well over the pin or cozily lodging itself in the shrub thicket I had been smartly laying up to avoid.  But perhaps more detrimental than the added strokes, is the fact that I make ridiculous statements relating to distance and pertaining to golf.  Once, in the car, I told two friends that a boy I knew in high school regularly drove a golf ball 450 yards.  That simply cannot be true, they said.  I persisted, saying that the kid drives like Tiger Woods – who regularly hits the mother club more than 400 yards, I said.  I was adamant about this yardage, and felt like an imbecile when of course we Googled to find that Mr. Woods, in fact has an average driving distance between 286 and 296 yards.  ‘Oh my gawd, I overshot by almost a half mile,’ I think to myself – another impressive misjudgment.  I had not been meaning to embellish, I am simply incapable of guesstimating yardage that is past the range of a pitching wedge.   If I cannot imagine myself walking heel to toe to the target location (giving me an approximate distance in feet – and three feet are in a yard), then I cannot postulate a distance for something and have it be anywhere in the orbit of correct unless I take a very lucky guess. 

            A similarly embarrassing conversation arose on the phone with my parents recently when I told them sharply that we (America) were in deep trouble in regards to the tumult in Egypt.  Little did my parents know, but the American government had been funneling more than eight billion dollars a month into the Middle Eastern nation and now, because of this monthly lump sum, Egyptians had zillions of dollars worth of equipment with which to take down Israel.  Now in fact, the US has been financing Egypt to the tune of just over 2 billion annually.  Don’t I feel sheepish – I overshot the correct amount by roughly 94 billion dollars.  I believe that I heard ‘2 billion’ and thought ‘oh man, that’s quite a bit’ and then, in repeating the amount to my parents, I had my finger on the pulse of the “quite a bit” category – which, in my head, houses every dollar amount over one million – and unfortunately pulled out a remarkably incorrect digit combination.  But how am I supposed to log amounts that are in the billions?  I will never have that much money, I will never be near a purchase in the realm of that dollar amount and I most certainly will never see billions of dollars ever in my lifetime … unless there is some bizarre natural disaster that leads to 400 percent inflation and I need a grocery cart to carry the amount of money that I will need to buy a loaf of bread, a la Zimbabwe.

            Anything over one million dollars is out of my sphere of accuracy; these quan  atities are totally unrelatable to my life and therefore I need rote memorization skills to retain any number with more than six digits. 

            My final demonstration of numeric ineptitude relates to weight.  If something weighs in the field of 250 pounds, I can do okay, because I imagine myself (roughly 125 pounds) holding heavy things – like babies or 1^st graders (because somehow I remember that I weighed 44 pounds when I was in first grade).  If the thing to be weighed is heavier than me holding three first graders (because that third one could go on my shoulders), I am unlikely to guess within 100 pounds of the correct weight.  So, essentially, I cannot gauge the weight of big – tall, fat or muscular – humans I see on the street, hauls of fruit, big sharks or heavy furniture. 

Now, I know that an elephant weighs about a ton, and I had an affinity for whales as a child so I know that a blue whale weighs about 10 tons.  With this knowledge, I would say that I could ballpark how many tons semi trucks, medium-sized boats and certain statues and monuments weigh.  But now, there are important weights that fall within my weight digestion gap (250 pounds and 2,000 pounds – 1 ton) that leads my inability to estimate to interfere with my everyday life. 

I have a fear of heights, and perhaps even more so, a fear of structural collapse.  So when I am in an elevator with, let’s say two large people, a man with a flatbed of fruit, and two moving men carrying a heavy-looking settee, and the little placard by the buttons says the elevator can carry 1.4 tons, I have a real problem.  I really cannot figure how many pounds are on that elevator but I’m paranoid so I’m probably going to overshoot, totally freak myself out, imagine the cable straining under the weight, pray to God the doors open, step out in cold sweats and take the stairs however many flights down.  This same thing has happened on gondolas, escalators and theme park waterslide platforms.

So, in sum, I will fall off my own grid if I ever become an obese billionaire professional golfer, surveyor or airline pilot. 

‘Uh oh, looks like the postman misdelivered a package’

            Today I received two books I ordered about a week ago online.  I unwrapped them and said to myself “Holy shit, what was I thinking?”

I imagine I’m probably the first person ever to purchase a German/Jewish 19^th century calisthenics manual along with a compilation of Mother Theresa’s personal writings – put together by none other than her dear friend, the priest Brian Kolodiejchuk – in the same Amazon.com order.

I had been having a pretty good day, generally happy, things were going well, fairly average but, upon opening them, I was blasted back to the week before – to revisit my younger self. 

            The prior week, I had found myself in the midst of a minor identity crisis.  I was turned down from a job, my living situation was in shambles, in the midst of a medical “issue”, work became remarkably difficult, and, financially, I had taken my spending cap for the week, squared it, multiplied it by two, and then gone out for a tight dinner at a too-tight bar. 

So, one particularly dreary evening, after I did that thing where you pour yourself a bowl of cereal and then realize that you actually have no milk, I decided to proactively use the Barnes & Noble gift card my cousin Les gave me for Christmas to turn things around.  I decided to seize the wheel, right the ship, and give my life a little makeover. 

First things first, I would start doing a sort of organicy morning exercise thing that became wildly popular in Weimar Germany and was thus guaranteed to not only boost my energy level, increase my life expectancy by about a decade and increase my flexibility quite a bit, but also make me appear more “sinewy”.  Hence the aged calisthenics booklet.  The Mother Theresa book would, interestingly enough, I thought, make me feel better about myself in the throes of a crisis in confidence – spawned from the feeling that my life isn’t going anywhere – because even Mama Theresa lost faith in God sometimes.  I’m just losing faith in myself, this is  contextually minor and  should really be like no problem. 

Looking back at the confirmation email, it appears that I made the purchase at about 11:30 pm, and I’m sure I went to bed that night with a self satisfied smile, feeling as though I’d made some serious progress towards improving my circumstances. 

Little did I know that my sad feelings would taper by the time the package arrived and I would be left sheepishly unwrapping the ridiculous combination of items and tearing up the receipt into unnecessarily small scraps promptly thereafter.  But like, damn, what a maniac. 

But I’m keeping both books, and I’ll store them together, as the spines snuggled up to one another will always carry the rosy aura of dreaming big. 

This one goes out to horses …

I’ve been on my share of “hayrides”.  Between regular autumnal trips to the pumpkin patch and annual visits to northern Michigan’s very own automobile-free Mackinac Island, I’ve been pulled by a horse while sitting in a carriage more than a time or two.  But, while these little rides were novelties to the other adventurers sitting in the hay - or on the cart - around me, I’ve always found it difficult to relax, seeing as how there is an undeserving and overworked young horse at the helm dragging us all around for no real purpose other than … enjoyment?

From a very young age, I found these little sojourns aboard horse-drawn whatevers remarkably undesirable.  Frankly, it was always alarming to me that no one else took note of the horses up front, which, I might mention, appeared none too plucky.  Not only were the hapless creatures of course responsible for our movement forward, but they would be grunting loudly as the apparatus they pulled - which we revelers were perched upon - jerked and twitched all over as their weight was laboriously transferred from one foot to the other.  But no one appeared to notice the treachery.  My fellow travelers were too busy picking their pumpkins from afar to realize that veins were bulging in our dutiful horse’s neck as tendrils of sweat poured down the little fellow’s mane, the equipment and harnesses chafing it’s sides as each oblivious sadist disembarked.

Even at my temporary sorority’s annual “barn dance,” after voracious chugs of rum and cider, I remember finding myself discomfited with the evening’s recreational mode of transit.  I was made eerily sober by the sight of a wagonload of inebriated panhellenic fools being toted around in large circles by a beleaguered and unsuspecting medium-sized horse.  Riding in a horse-drawn anything is never particularly smooth, so I’m still not even sure why someone would think to combine binge drinking with this decidedly bumpy variation of animal cruelty.

All this comes to mind as I sit on the city bus, considering the appreciable heft required of the craft.

The vehicular rectangle lurches it’s way up a mild incline that a generous surveyor may deem a “hill,” but which a layman would call no such thing.  Yet the bus heaves forth until it reaches the top, finding flat road and coasting onward.  As we near a stop, the air brakes are pumped and let out a mechanical squeal that reminds me of the robot R2D2 being thrown into the hot lava mouth of a volcano.  We coast for another moment before our velocity is compromised by the braking mechanism.  Maybe it takes this long for the apparatus to register the actual brake pedal being pressed, or maybe it’s the sheer inertia of the huge metal bus and the crush of passengers inside preventing an immediate slow-down.

Little matter, we’re slowing down now, approaching the front of the bus stop queue - a cleaving mass, a cacophony of squeaking brakes and belching exhaust clouds bearing down on the anxious patrons.  We’ve stopped – surprisingly near to the presumed goal destination of the “Bus Stop” sign – and the platform sinks down, allowing the new passengers to mount the stairs without pulling a hamstring.  The body of people press together as the doors fan shut and the fuselage platform slowly rises, the riders surveying one another as the hydraulics below deck groan under the weight of obese Americans and their average-weight counterparts. And we’re off once more, a bloated mass of engine, wheels and humans.

The gas pedal goes down, we motor forth, and I take a moment to appreciate that it is but an inanimate engine saddled with my weight; the horsepower’s not on my conscience.