Not done with Math

By Emmanuelle

Math is life; life is math. Math may be as simple as counting two hands, the left and the right; or it may be the most difficult, most complicated brainwork mortal man does in his life.

Take this example for a starter: 1 + 1 = 3. One man loves one woman.  One man + one woman = one man, one woman, one child. And they are just getting started.

What if one man loves more than one woman, or vice versa? Then math would be a differential equation wherein man is satisfied and woman is substituted. Or vice versa.

Woman forgets to count her safe days, she begins to count nine months. For the first trimester, don’t fall down the stairs. Beyond nine months, the baby is overdone; before nine months, the baby is half-done, pay more for the incubator. When the doctor pronounces baby as healthily full term yet carried for only seven or eight months inside wife’s bloated belly and still wife insists the baby is just premature – someone had forgotten how to count. Or the baby has two Dads, one is constant, the other is a hidden variable. Or worse, an unknown quantity. It’s another equation that needs more than calculus to solve.    

If Mom has her babe’s health in mind and a limited budget to mine, the babe has two plump constantly warm milk-sources to suck dry in a year. If Mom is one of the pair of income providers, the multi-millionaire milk companies have one more bottled formula-sucker to suck dry with the measure one is to one, one feeding every two or four hours. With vitamins one ml gradually but surely increasing to five ml once or twice a day. Mom’s shapely form and the ease of convenience are costly to the purse.

When baby discards crawling on its four limbs and tiptoes on its two chubby feet at less than twelve months, start counting your blessings. You have a genius in your four hands, Mom and  Dad. Especially so when the baby inclines its head and coos at its playing blocks, seeing them as quantities of space – solids, surfaces, lines and angles. Or spheres, cy-linders and cones.

Whether one’s child is a Smart Aleck or simply Plain Jane, Mom and Dad have their entire working lifetime to solve the economics of mathematics. Or is it the mathematics of economics? Is the couple’s combined income capability proportionate to the family’s combined munching capacity? Is it cheaper to buy by the sack or by the sachet? (Oh, by the way, don’t you know the Philippines is the largest gobbler of the sachet market in the whole of Asia if not the world?) 

And am not done yet with math. If input refuses to commensurate with output, one or both partners become overseas Filipino worker. Then, the entire social system goes gaga. A family, unaccustomed to too much plenty, uploads, then overloads. When the principal axes the theorem, the contract I mean, the family suddenly unloads the gold carats. One day one counts by the thousands, next day one counts by the deadened ring of the peso coin.

Meanwhile, the kids who came cheaper by the dozen, grow in leaps and bounds, not in inched feet now, but in metered centimeters. Notwithstanding the inconsistencies in their parameters, the kids seem to sprout taller, to weigh heavier. They are hungrier and more thirsty by the hour, by the minute, by the second! They consume jumbo burgers by the kilos, and a kilo is definitely more than twice a pound heavy. They glug down liters to gallons of coke, so pay extra for the bottomless choice.

Expenses for education, allowances, fare and treats are not jokes to trade with friends. These are tales of disaster waiting to explode. Public schools are swamped with the by-products of the always poor, the suddenly poor, the sometime-poor, and the not-hoping-to-stay-forever-poor. The middle class is a nullity, there is no such thing in the vocabulary. A massive linear transformation has taken place.

Compute the averages for survival when there is a re-arrangement of the elements – you may come out with real numbers. Real numbers are not very pretty to behold.

Though, the Filipino is a sturdy survivor. They laugh at the corniest kernel of jokes. And they seem to have a vector (victor?) for a president, whose velocity, force and acceleration can be described not only by her magnitude (slight does not apply here) but also by the sense of her direction – which is definitely zooming in mindlessly or mindfully to charter change.

I am a simpleton; am simply tonedeaf. But, mind you, I shower-sing with math in my mind. “Sampung mga daliri, kamay at paa, dalawang taynga, dalawang mata, ilong na  maganda.”

Dare me on the last item, and you become one statistic less.

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