Maybe Mom Was Right

When I told my Mother I wanted to go to college, she made this stipulation: either major in mathematics or nursing or else you don't go.

I was furious. I wanted to major in drama and minor in english. Those were the two things I loved and I wanted to explore them further.

I hated math. It gave me a headache. Thinking in that way felt like I was re-programming my brain, and I didn't like having to pop tylenol all the time to deal with the brain-drain.

But when I look at the conversations I've been having with Mary Hodder, I realize that, in this Modern World of Computers, math rules. Without math, there are no alogorithims for searching, no proof of what's what, whose on top, where things are going.. Without math there are no computers. Period.

I don't know if my mother was somehow intutiting the future, or if she was discouraging me from college because she and my father couldn't pay for it (as she told me much later on). So I wonder what may have happened had I taken math rather than going off in my own direction and being something of an accidental cultural anthropologist.

And maybe it's that latent math geek that keeps me drawn into the discussions of search criteria and algorithims. At least, now, the headaches aren't so bad.