Mathman Lives. Rock on.

I had another Bad Dream last night, in which I was sitting in a college Geometry class panicking, because the teacher was drawing M.C. Escher-looking diagrams on the board and I was thinking in that not-quite-coherent way of dream-thought, "Hey, no fair! Isn't this supposed to be Euclidean Geometry? All about two-dimensional planes and shit?" Then, the discussion turned to astrophysics, and everyone was apparently getting it, nodding their heads sagely and even raising their hands and offering new, brilliant insights of their own. Meanwhile, I was breaking out in a light sweat, flipping through the textbook, which seemed to be full of ominous-looking sines and cosines and ugly looking differential equations that looked like calculus, freaking out because I didn't get, and everyone else does!

Variations on the Academic Insecurity dream typically land me in chemistry labs, or taking a French test (Quel horreur! or is it Quelle horreure? or Quelle horreur? You see, this is why I have nightmares about French.) Every once in awhile, however, the dreams will be about my ultimate Academic Arch-Nemesis: math. I never went beyond pre-calculus in either highschool or college because I Suck At Math, And Why Pretend It Exists Outside of School If I Don't Have To. (Reasons that make me glad I wasn't born in the former Soviet bloc, and slotted erroneously from childhood to become an Engineer Comrade for the state or else work in a gulag, because I would have ended up in a gulag, and probably not for very long given my lack of giftedness in physical education.)

Other people have dreams about being naked in front of others, I have Academic Failure dreams to highlight and underscore my insecurities, I guess. Great. You can take the geek out of the classroom, but you can't take the classroom out of the geek.

P.S. Does anyone else remember that character "Mathman" from that old PBS show SquareOne that also featured "Mathnet"--a spoof on Dragnet? For those who need the refresher, Mathman was the little computerized dude on a pac-man-like game, and, as I recall he used to run around a little maze and stop periodically to consider little math equations, or whatever, and then gobble up the right answer. If he failed, he had to hightail it out of there, because the little tornado thing would eat him. In fact, the best part of the whole cartoon, the point of watching the thing at all, I daresay, was when he fucked up and ate the wrong number, and would have to hightail it out of there, screeching "Mathman! Mathman! Mathman!" in his cute little robotic voice as he tried to escape the tornado thing. Maybe you had to be there, but he was the stuff of legend, I'm telling you.

Come on. Don't tell me you don't remember Mathman, super PBS icon that he was?

No. I'm not kidding, there was such a thing as Mathman, and apparently I'm not the only person who remembers watching the show as a young geekling, either. Click on the Mathman link. There are others out there that remember him, and pay tribute. Even after what must be at least a decade and a half of being buried in the obscurity of PBS cancelled show archives-- Mathman lives. All hail, Mathman!