I Miss Algebra

I've been getting into crossword puzzles and logic games lately. It makes me feel smart. My great-aunt does the crossword daily to, as she says, keep from getting senile. Last Saturday I spent a peaceful afternoon sipping tea and working on the puzzle - ideally I would've been occasionally directing queries about particularly difficult clues to my sweetie, sitting across the room reading or otherwise absorbed in his own quiet pursuits. As it is, I finished the puzzle on my own. I like the doable ones. I doubt I'll ever work up to the Sunday ones or the cryptic English crosswords that take hours/days of pondering. What's the point of just being frustrated for hours on end like that?

Speaking of wanting to feel smart (and of being frustrated for hours on end), sometimes I wish I could retake the math classes that drove me nuts as a kid. I can sort of glimpse the beauty of mathematics, shimmering on the horizon. I feel like I let - not myself, not even my dad who wanted me to enjoy math the way he did, but more the concept of knowledge - down. If it's possible to let down a concept. Here I am priding myself on having a scientific mind, and yet I never really appreciated algebra. Trig was fun, and so was geometry, but I didn't internalize the concepts enough to be able to use them now. Maybe sometime I can take a summer school class and relearn that stuff. Get it solid. Maybe I could even retake cal 2 - now that I've got the time to devote to it, instead of being distracted by five other classes.