Morning Mental Math

I may have mentioned this before, but I stink at math. Oh, I can add, subtract, and multiply and all the stuff (notice I said nothing about division) decently, it’s just that once you get past that I get into trouble.

Algebra was always a mystery. At a certain point in class, I just simply lost the thread. I would be doing fine, getting good scores on all my tests and then the instructor would say something like “And if we take this algorithm and make this number negative, what would happen?”

The rest of the class would have a collective “Aha!” moment and start scribbling notes. I, on the other hand, would have “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts” going through my head. From that point on, I just became more and more lost until I started getting better scores on my tests by just writing ‘Albania’ for all of the answers.

Anyway, there is one type of math that I excel at. I call it Morning Mental Math (I would call it 3M, but I would get sued). Mx3 is when you wake up and have a certain amount of time before you need to actually be out the door, but you desperately want to sleep in. Therefore you start trying to figure out exactly how much longer you can sleep and what you can put off to get that sleep.

For example: Ideally, it takes me 80-minutes from getting up to arriving at work.
30 minutes on the exercise bike
10 minutes to eat
10 minutes to bathe and dress
10 minutes to make my lunch
20 minutes to actually drive to work

In a perfect world, I would be up by 7:20. However, on many mornings (ie, all of them), I slap the Snooze button and then wake up at 7:30-ish. This is when the Mental Morning Math starts.

I desperately want, nay NEED, 10 more minutes of sleep. So I say to myself ‘If I only eat half a bowl of cereal and wash really, really fast, I can sleep ‘till 7:40.’ Ten minutes pass. ‘Okay,’ I say to myself again. ‘I can do 20 minutes on the bike, but do them extra hard.’ Ten more minutes pass. ‘I really need 15 more minutes,’ I say once again. ‘If I divide 10 by 2, that gives me 5, which means that I can make 1 PBJ in half the time, while simultaneously riding my bike for 15 minutes at top speed, which means I can bathe and dress in 337 seconds, while taking the fast route to work, thus getting (4.3 x (4 / pie) + the square root of 13) more minutes of sleep and still getting to work on time.’

I hit the Snooze button once again, have a short, muddled dream about carnivorous bowling balls (they eat your fingers), and wake up at 8:18. At that point, I mutter ‘Albania’ and roll back over.

I eventually arrive at work fifteen minutes late, with shampoo in my hair, no lunch, and my underwear on backwards and on the outside of my pants.

My coworkers, I should point out, no longer bother to comment.

Cheers,
-Jason