Why does everyone miss the math question??

All right, I’ve all but given up on preserving the integrity of this blog, so I’m just going to use it as my regular journal now and vent.  If you started reading this from the beginning, you can stop here if you want.  You’ll still gain valuable insights about me if you continue, but they won’t be as structured.  Which could very well mean that the insights you’ll gain from this point forward will be even more valuable.  Who knows.

So I was browsing profiles the other day, as I often do, and came across one that was very lengthy.  As you can probably guess, I consider long profiles to be a huge turn-on (provided, of course, that it exhibits quality as well as quantity).  I get tired of reading one-sentence answers to all the profile questions all the time, and I get even more tired of reading answers that don’t even attempt to give me a feel for the girl’s identity beneath the superficial.  Lengthy profiles, on the other hand, are usually full of juicy self-disclosure and introspection, and they tend to indicate that a girl is both interesting enough to be able to talk about herself for several paragraphs at a time and confident enough to believe that all of those paragraphs are worth the reader’s time.  Now here was a profile that was among the top ten longest I’ve read (and I’ve at least glanced at a couple thousand by now), written by a girl who was very attractive, very articulate, and newly single.  And not only was she an active blogger, but she actually posted a link directly to her blog right at the beginning of her profile.  If brains could have hard-ons, mine would have been rock-solid.

I look up at our match percentage, however, and we’re at 68%.  That’s, like, a D+.  (Come on, you know you extrapolate the match percentages to letter grades too.)  So I go to the match questions to find out why, and, just as I feared, one of the questions we differed on was the math one.  You know–the one that asks which number comes next in the sequence.  She gave the “Don’t know/don’t care/dislike this question” as her answer and wrote “I. Hate. Math. Lol” in the answer explanation.  And, just as I’ve done on numerous other occasions, I yelled the title of this post to the heavens in exasperation.  Making sure to include the double question mark in my intonation of the question.  And you know when I have two question marks, I mean serious business.

My own answer explanation for that question says it all: it’s fifth grade math.  Really, it is.  I remember answering questions just like that one in the fifth grade.  I am certain that upwards of 95% of the high school students I tutor, including the lower scoring ones, could answer that question correctly without batting an eyelash.  Okay, to be fair, that answer doesn’t necessarily mean she would have gotten the question wrong.  Maybe she just hates math so much that she didn’t answer it on principle.  But she also answered similarly for the logic question (“If some men are doctors…”) AND the Shakespeare question (“Wherefore art thou Romeo”).  That last one probably surprises me the most, because it’s English, not math/logic, and she writes for a living, for God’s sake.  I wouldn’t even mind if she fucking Googled the answer–to me, answering those questions correctly at the very least indicates that you care enough about basic knowledge to at least be embarrassed about missing these questions.

And then she writes about how she’s a smart girl, and she likes smart guys.  Nerdy, geeky guys, even.  And the worst part of all is, it’s hard to argue with her.  It is hard to argue with her with that profile–one of the most articulate, detailed, deftly written profiles I’ve ever come across during my long, illustrious career in profile judgment–with that profile staring me in the face.

It probably goes to show that there are more types of intelligence than I’ve allowed myself to consider.  Maybe my ideas about what intelligence is are in need of reform.  Maybe I’ve been wasting my time judging my compatibility with girl after girl after girl in completely the wrong way.  Maybe my love life will continue to stagnate until I finally come to terms with the complete bullshit nature of my brand of elitism.  I freely acknowledge these possibilities. And yet, one problem still remains: I cannot date someone who misses the math question.  I CANNOT DATE SOMEONE WHO MISSES THE GODDAMN MATH QUESTION.  I am constitutionally unable to do so, and I am probably destined to remain this way until death.

Can’t think of a conclusion here, but I’ve already structured this post more than I originally intended to anyway.  If you liked this one, I’m sure there’ll be plenty more where that came from.