Chapter Twenty-One: Game On! Jinghan VS Maths Assignment (~jinghan)

Usually on a Friday evening I give myself a break from studying and make giant platonic solids with my boyfriend or bake cookies something that doesn’t involve real brain work like that… (What? Did you think I’d take a break from being nerdy on weekends? Pft!) But this week considering that my Saturday was going to involve tagging along to a maths people get together with my boyfriend, while rescuing giant platonic solids from being damaged from prolonged existence in the maths club room and going to the football with my family* I figured I should get some of my assignments done on Friday…

Question 4 part b is where I’m up to… I feel too tired for this, but I push on anyway.

Ten minutes in: I’m still on the same question and inequalities are left and right all over the place, but never facing the way I want them to!

Twenty minutes in: I’m still on the same question. Oh, but it’s such a easy looking question, the answer should just fall out! Wait maybe I wrote that inequality wrong? Oh yes I did! It should work now…

Thirty minutes in: Nope it didn’t work. I’m still on the same question. Inequalities are flapping around my head like little cartoon birds do. Rah:

Fourty minutes in: I’m still on that question! See, it’s one of those questions that you can’t move on from because the answer feels like it’s just there and another few minutes of work will get you there… and I really just want to conquer it and get it over and done with.

Fifty minutes in: I’m still on that question. And my emotional stability is really worn down. My expectations of getting good chunks of work done tonight and having worked really hard and made no progress and feeling like I should move on to another question, but if I can’t even do this little simple one how can I do the others that look harder? All the frustration I’ve been suppressing wells up.  And now I’m in this emotional state I’m not sure I am even capable of thinking straight anymore… great.

I’m just too tired to do a question this hard right now. 

And by the time I’ve thought this I can’t stop the tears. (I was never good at not-crying…) I’m embarrassed by the fact I’m crying over something so small as just not being able to do a maths problem. And it’s clear that I can’t do anymore maths tonight. I make plans not to go out to the gathering the next day and to work on my maths. Fine Maths. You win.

—-

It’s Saturday morning and my blankets are all askew on the bed. I indulge in the awkwardly placed warm patch in which I’ve curled up among them, but then I remember the maths problem I left unsolved… I play around with the equations in my head… yes! wait… no…. that’s not it… Arg I need some paper to write this down on.

Braving the cold, I dash over to my desk for a pad of purple stickies and a pencil and then dive back into my warm spot in bed. Scribbling away… scribbling away… what had my boyfriend said about that question: it look like a question where you could just use the definitions… wait the definition of infimum… triangle inequality… wait… yes! found it!

“Ha! Ha! Take that bloody infs! You thought you could defeat me?! Think again!! Oh by the way… good morning!” I text to my boyfriend.

Okay maybe I should get out of bed now… but first I’ll just grab my computer and write a blog post because I need to hound it in that I won in the end.

*by the way I’ve never been before… neither has my mum or dad… we will look like first class asian tourists ^^v hooray!