I had big plans for this last weekend. I was going to see Dr. Strange’s Multiplex Theater of Madness, and I was going to get some supplies for my upcoming trip to Scotland. In addition, I had a LOT of couch sitting and video gaming planned. Despite my family not knowing any of that, they somehow found a way to mess with those plans. Can I tell you why I answer that I have no concrete plans whenever anyone asks what I’m doing on the weekend? Because, of course, any time I ever make a plan, it get’s screwed. Is it any wonder I hate making plans?

If I was one of those people that was good at making Plans B-Z, I might start planning again. But that would require thinking ahead, and doing more work, so now I don’t ever have a Plan B.

I’m used to my video gaming getting interrupted. There are three other humans in my house that need things sometimes, like food and water, and bugs getting squished. And some of the younger humans tend to not take care of their simple things called homework that their teachers ask them to do.

So, at the last minute when history needs to be dug up from the past, a 40-page paper needs to be written by Monday morning at 7 am (dang me for learning how to creatively write!), and math formulas need to be downloaded into my brain as fast as Neo learned Kung Fu, I am called into the dreaded home office. The last thing that I expected to be doing on Saturday and Sunday was re-learning the slope intercept formula of y=mx + b. Do I look like someone that can learn how to do math at a moment’s notice?

In seventh grade when trying to decide what I wanted to do for a career, I looked at nothing that even smelled like it might have a math component. I even looked at skydiving, but then I learned that I might have to figure out the right angle of a hypotenuse in order land without dying. I ditched that idea really quick.

I vividly remember the last math class I took in college. I had the fancy (at the time) TI-81 calculator that could be programmed to play Tetris and a bevy of other early Game Boy games, and I was like, “If I can escape this class with a D-, I promise that I will never look at a math book again.” If the math couldn’t be done on a calculator or Excel sheet, then I would ask my companies math department to do it. Or I would marry a teacher that had math skills and loved to do homework with kids.

I managed to avoid the M word for almost 31 years. But then, just like Michael Corleone in the Godfather, “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”.

Not only was in charge of our major international family mafia corporation (the drugs, the mules, the finances, etc.), but I also had to learn graphing, formulas, slope intercepts, algebra and other super messed up things. Whoever invented math needs to be whacked by one of my family thugs.

I did a lot of hard things this weekend. I had to figure out how much our family charges for a bunch of “legal” drugs, how the sanitation department launders our money, who and how to whack our competition across town, but the most ridiculous thing was how to do math again.

I had a ton of advisors were good at doing the “laundry” thing, and others who were experts in “making offers that they can’t refuse”, but none of my thousands of “family members” could remember a thing about math.

I think there might be only a handful of people in this world that actually know how to do all math, which means, I’m probably going to need all the money I ever earn, just to have enough to pay a tudor to teach my kids math.

I did tell my son that after him, I’m done with math. Don’t ever expect me to teach my grandkids how to do it. You better either find a wife that has the superpower of knowing math, or be rich enough to find Mr. Thomas Anderson, so you can pay him to become NEO, get him to go into the Matrix, and retrieve the “ALL MATH” download and you can pay him to tutor your kids.

Of course, my son doesn’t listen to me, so just when I think I’m out with the grandkids, “he’ll pull me back in.”

ARRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH

Bitter Godfather Ben