so he said: you know it's perfectly EASY, I bet you could all finish it within
fifteen minutes. well, he was right. after fifteen minutes an examinee did hand
in his answer sheet and after half an our the class room was almost deserted,
somehow I sensed the ominous silence and raised my eyes, gee, only no more than
five persons were still fighting this, well, losing battle.
when I say losing battle, I mean it. the last three remained on their seats,
not inclusive of me and the other girl from the department of archaeology,
were all guys (yes, guys) from the chemical engineering department, and the way
they looked, I was convinced, that they hardly studied at all. (an arbitrary
statement indeed. well, bite me!)
I was lost. while other examinees could react by their mathematics instincts,
I struggled for almost half an hour to recall high school arithmetic-- I'd be
ashamed to use the word mathematic, for now I'm sure I'm no better in math than
a junior high student. at first I tried to use an inequality equation, and soon
enough I found my self stuck, so I resorted to linear programming, before long
I realized I'd never been the sketching kind. eventually I gave up, adopting
enumerations-- stupid, but since I was offered plenty of time, why take risks?
and I cannot stop myself from grumbling: when you said easy, you meant easy for
people like you, people of your kind-- arithmetically skillful, people with
clear logic, people that are often not liberal arts majors. yes I am making a
generalization here but overall this theory is universally applicable. and then
I sighed a little bit, finally having to face the truth. this step may be after
all too ambitious for me. over and over again I was reminded of my own incapa-
bility: after a year utterly free from mathematics, a subject I so used to take
pride in, I've forgot it all. as if it simply vanished out of my mind, rather
than locked in a rusty box, abandoned, crouching, somewhere beneath piles and
piles of excessive memory rubbish (for example, what I had taken for breakfast
in the past one week.) they are GONE. the senses, the dexterity, all gone.
helplessly diffident. what may become of me, no, what remains of me?
--
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