MAT135Y has numbers. We are numbers. But not really.

"I try to avoid looking backward and keep looking upward."
-- Charlotte Bronte

So I'm sitting here and I'm wallowing in my own lethargy, post-French oral miderm. I stared my math notes straight in the face, and all they did was stare back (menacingly, mind you). I've memorized only two trigonometric identities and the graphs are varying and splicing themselves inside my photographic memory. I'm looking at the previous tests and whistling inappropriate things to no one in particular; I'm feeling very lazy and very vulgar about this MAT135 term test. In short: calculus smells. Terribly.

As much purpose as math has, it is one of the most variable subjects out there: variables all over the place, limits and asymptotes -- there is no definitiveness in this course. All you know is that you will never know enough to know what is necessary. As a certain person once said, math is too vague, too ambiguous to be liked; whereas chemistry (CHM138H) is more practical and understandable; the concepts are pliant, yet embedded and firm. There's no, "If x is equivalent to ya^2, then it is most certain that if you..." (Though I'm pretty sure Prof Anthony Lam [such a funny man] would disagree and find a way to correlate a lot of things, including the un-correlatable, to calculus.) The ifs and buts of society rest on the shoulders of Calculus and all those who linger by its side. (No offense to anyone that really loves the course, though secretly, I'm shaking my finger at you and wondering why.)

Maybe calculus is the Career Killer. Who knows. (I don't intend to find out.)

I'm looking back at the previous post and I'm thinking that maybe I lacked humanity when I wrote those words. I wrote what was on my mind, which is all UofT really asks (what is in your mind; is your IQ good enough; are you smart enough to be here?) us for, but I forgot to add a bit of sympathy. We are numbers, yes. We are thoughts, yes. But we also are people, and being subjected to the harshness of the cold and the harshness of reality has blurred that warm ideal. We live, we breathe and we hurt. Let no one, no institution take that realism from us.

To quote Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice:

"If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" (Quote Act III, scene I)

And we do bleed. We do laugh. We do die. All that jazz. Numbers, as much as we are, we are not. By regulation and by standardization and by nameless-facing, we are numbers. The university looks at us with bar codes and bills, and in a sense that is who are to them, but we're not. Give yourself the freedom to be a face and a person, which you are. The previous post was a bit cold, a bit unforgiving, and a tad bit too brick-in-the-face. It was my way of coming to terms with brutal reality; I took every aspect into account, except for the fact that we aren't machines.

Enough of this madness!

Back to trigonometric functions, The Hospital's Rule (yes, the Hospital, as in the test wounds your ego and you end up there), the MVT (best known to me as fab minus fa over ba), and all that jazz.

Oh curse you Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid.