Maybe One Isn't the Loneliest Number
The Math Conspiracy Hiding Behind Romance and Your Favorite Trips of all Time
How does math, the subject many of us hated in school, factor into your love life and show up in your favorite trips?
First, let’s find out how you felt about math in school. Please take the quick poll below.
Between us, I hated math, and I sucked at it, but not enough to choose death instead. And, for most of my adult life, I hated being alone, but getting married wasn’t always the solution. But with Valentine’s Day looming, here I am, alone again, naturally.
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But what does all this have to do with math?
The math teachers may have fooled you, but they didn’t fool me. Early on, I learned math is a conspiracy to make normal kids look stupid and reveal the math geniuses.
It also creates lifetime employment for math teachers, who keep the evil plot alive. The math scheme is universal. I fled America to escape math, but found it everywhere.
Europe. Africa. Asia. Numbers are silently at work all around the world.
Later in life, I discovered we travel by the numbers. When I was single, I was seen as a loner. When I was married, people assumed that I was happy and fulfilled by it.
No matter where you go, math is there waiting for you. Get used to it. Let’s start at the beginning, when I uncovered the subterfuge.
The Conspiracy, Revealed
As a young boy, I figured out math was a fake subject. It used numbers to numb you. Aha! That’s why they’re called numbers! All the teacher had to do was write a simple equation on the board, and I was a goner. Practically catatonic. Call the medics!
Little did I know we travel by the numbers, throughout our lives, across space and time. There is no escape.
My quest over the last 45-plus years has been to unmask the secret global cabal of mysterious mathematicians who hoodwinked us for as long as any of us can recall.
Here, for the first time, all will be revealed. The secret code will be broken…
Leaving aside Chinese and Indian numerals, which are only used by a few billion people, most of us only know about two kinds of numerals: Roman and Arabic
The Hindus’ contribution to math was nothing, by which I mean that, among other things, they invented the concept of zero. That does not sound like much. Alone, zero is nothing, but in 10, 100, or 1,000 it becomes increasingly valuable. The Arab conquerors liked zero so much that they carried it with them wherever they went.
After Rome conquered the world, everyone used Roman numerals until the Arabs conquered southern Europe; then, Europeans fell in love with Arabic numerals.
Remember algebra from high school? The word comes from the Arabic term al-jabr, which I believe means “gibberish.” This is why I wrote gibberish on my algebra tests.
My point is that numbers are universal across our lives and travels in time and space.
We are born on a given day at a given time. The clock starts counting from that point till we die. Your obituary will say, “So and so, born (date) died (today’s date), aged X.”
You start life with numbers, you end with them. Travel begins and ends with them.
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As a nomad who has been on the road full-time for three years, my other point is that, while most of us know we travel through space, from point A to point B, we also travel through time. I have been time-traveling for 67 years now, partly to see my country, Canada, and Mexico, but also, still trying to escape from math.
I failed to escape it, and haven’t done very well evading the ravages of time either.
Time, like gravity, is a powerful force from which none of us can escape. We can run, but we can’t hide, no matter where we start, or where we end up.
Math - The Language I Never Learned, and Love, the Language I Never Spoke
Math is a language unto itself that I never learned to speak. As an adult, I noticed other people had begun to talk about their love language, a tongue I never learned.
At eight, I started first grade at St. Joan of Arc, a Catholic school. The nuns excelled at motivating us. “If you don’t learn this subject, boy, I will beat the daylights out of you.”
They were very persuasive.
One of the first things I learned was that I hated math. Something just didn’t add up. Letters I could understand. They formed whole words, which made sense to me.
English was a language I could speak. It allowed me to communicate with other kids. No one spoke math. What, I wondered, was the point of learning something so useless?
Also, I wondered why, as Roman Catholics, we didn’t use Roman numerals. It made no sense.
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All through grade school and high school, I dreaded math. It knocked me out cold. The math teachers tormented me; they saw me squirm when they put a difficult equation on the board. I shrank down in my seat and tried to disappear. They pounced.
“Carl,” they’d say, smiling fiendishly, “can you come up here and solve this equation?” holding out a piece of chalk to entice me. I’d say, “I’d rather commit hari-kari.”
By the time I reached university and encountered still more math, I decided to run away in search of a place free of numbers. Surely, there must be a Shangri-La!
So, I spent my adult life traveling around the world, learning new languages, discovering wonderful words, only to find that numbers are everywhere.
Travel–Solving the Equation
For example, in Morocco, where I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, merchants never posted the price of their goods or told us the prices. They just said, “Guess!”
Staring at a nice “oriental” rug, trying to calculate what it would cost me, I would throw out a number. The vendor would scowl. ”That is much too low!” he would say. I’d say, “OK, how much?” He gave an astronomical figure that knocked me off my feet.
Picking myself up and dusting myself off, I protested, “That is way too much!” We kept bargaining until we solved the equation so as to produce equal amounts of pain on each side: I paid more than I wanted, and the vendor made less than he had hoped.
During long nights alone with my thoughts in Marrakesh, I realized that our days were numbered, numbers were moving (tracking how far we go, how fast, which direction), and enumerated human interactions, like the outcome of bargaining.
Travel isn’t just changing scenery and exotic geography. Through it flows abstract mathematical forces like gravity: invisible, powerful, pervasive, and inescapable.
Gravity is no laughing matter. If you doubt the existence of gravity, toss a bowling ball straight up over your head. Then, close your eyes and wait briefly. It will come to you.
The more I pondered the presence of math, the more I saw it in the world around me.
The color of the sky, the changing seasons, the rotation of the earth that separates day and night, the beating of our hearts, the rhythm of our breathing are all numerical.
Math even governs our inner emotional states and relationships in mysterious ways.
The Arithmetic of Emotions and Relationships
The math teachers taught us how numbers behave, but not how they make us feel.
One is the first real number. It was years before I learned in a Beatles song that “one is the loneliest number.” Traveling alone, I knew how terribly lonely one could be.
The misery of emotional math: Numbers sometimes shape how we feel.
Later, after getting married, Ilearned that a man can’t continue to hang out with his single friends, because they are bums. All they do is drink beer and watch sports.
Well, yeah! Like, what’s wrong with that? Apparently, everything.
Instead, I stayed home and acted like a responsible, married man.
We had children, and stared at each other across the table each night. The kids screamed and flung food. Oh, joy. We ran out of things to say to each other.
Sometimes, two can be even lonelier than one. Look around a restaurant on Valentine’s Day and count all the couples sitting there with nothing to say.
Tell me that isn’t lonely. And awkward. And embarrassing. Blame it on the fact that some idiot decided we all have to perform a silly romantic ritual one day each year.
If numbers are in a hurry, instead of adding, they multiply, something that, as Catholics, we excelled at. If they want to downsize quickly, they divide, which married Catholics aren’t allowed to do. Through marriage, two people become one.
That’s Catholic math!
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When you travel, numbers are everywhere. How far is it from A to B? How long is the flight? What does a ticket cost? What time does the plane leave? When will it arrive?
Here is a math problem for you. When you travel overnight from the U.S. to Europe on a six-hour night flight, how many hours of sleep do you get?
Think carefully.
They keep you up for hours before serving dinner. When you are about to fall asleep, the sun comes up. The night disappears; you arrive early in the morning.
The answer is you get no god-damn sleep at all. Welcome to Europe!
Invisible Forces at Play
Are numbers at work in neighboring countries, like Mexico or Canada? Yes!
Numbers follow me every time I cross the Mexican border, forcing me to convert currency. At present, I change dollars into pesos at about 1:17. Why this rate?
It is numerical judo.
Normal Americans, like me, can’t multiply or divide by 17. A bartender told me a happy hour margarita was 85 pesos. “Let’s see,” I mumbled. “85 divided by 17. That’s, uhm…”
My mind went blank. My dog, Mr. Bones, sighed. “If you buy two, it’s 170 pesos. Ten dollars.”
The bartender said, ‘Señor, you have a very smart dog. Would you like two margaritas?” “Gosh, two for ten, sure! Si!” I pulled out a wad of bills and put them on the bar.
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A Canadian dollar is currently about 73 cents of the U.S. $. Math-challenged Americans like me can’t figure out what things cost at that exchange rate.
Some things are actually cheaper.
A small cup of coffee at Tim Horton’s, the Canadian version of Starbucks, is $1.99 Canadian, less than a small black coffee at Starbucks. You get caffeinated very cheaply.
Gas, however, is not cheap in Canada.
When I pulled into my first Canadian gas station, the posted price was $1.27.
“Mr. Bones,” I said, “Look how cheap gas is here!” He stared at me. “That’s the price for a liter, genius, “ he said. “Oh,” I said. “But what does a gallon cost?” “How should I know?” he said. “I’m just a dog!”
We figured out that a gallon of gas in Canada costs about $4.80 U.S. We spent a lot of money on gas visiting three different provinces in eastern Canada last fall.
After a month in Canada, I was able to convert my remaining Canadian dollars back into US currency. You can convert and reconvert money, but you can’t convert time.
Time is money, but it is also a unit of life. You can only have the time of your life once.
Life by the Numbers
Travel is full of surprises.
When, as a young man, I first went to Africa with the Peace Corps in 1981, little did I know that I would spend much of my adult life over there and grow old before returning to the U.S. in 2020, due to the sudden, terrifying outbreak of COVID.
A math teacher could turn this into a simple story problem: “Carl, if you spent 40 years of your adult life in Africa, what would it cost you?” My answer: “My youth?”
Time - One Thing We Can’t Convert
However, I fooled the teacher, converting my years in Africa into a memoir, a different kind of story problem. In it, I started as a young man and wound up an old one.
Years accumulate, consuming our lives, subtracting our youth and vigor. It hit me that numbers are not just units of calculation. Our years on earth are the units of our lives.
Time also adds value to life.
Memories of youthful travels become more precious over time as we grow older. We can never recreate the experiences of our youth again. The Morocco of the 1980s no longer exists; a new Morocco has replaced it. The young man I was exists no longer.
Through traveling, I also learned to manipulate numbers in new ways.
I figured out what was valuable, and solved the equation of how to live an interesting life. I put in time and effort and distance. I added in all the people I met, the places I went, plus the wonderful things I saw and did and ate and heard and so on.
Everything Counts
The moral of this story is, everything counts: the miles we travel, the years we live, the crazy currency conversions, wonderful people, fascinating languages and cultures.
To any math teachers I may have offended, apologies. I was kidding. I love math, really. To any starry lovers who think Valentine’s Day is the best, enjoy your day.
My advice?
Be sure to count every moment you spend traveling. As the classic Mastercard commercial says, “PRICELESS.” (But they still put a price on everything.)
Like it or not, we travel by the numbers; the trick is making the most of it.
Don’t waste your entire life working.
Travel as much as you can. Convert money into experience at the best exchange rate by exhibiting a lot of enthusiasm, openness, kindness, and curiosity on the road.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Did this post in any way change your mind about math or the role it plays in our travels? If so, I would love to hear about it. Please share any comments.
I began to wonder if math suffers from an image problem. Why does learning math have to be so boring to so many kids, when math in application is so fascinating?
Maybe it’s because our math teachers are not the most exciting people in the world. My math teacher, Mr. Piddle, would say, “Help Mr. Piddle solve the math riddle.”
Look at how math is portrayed in movies—as the basis of an exciting secret code in movies like the Da Vinci Code. Maybe math should be taught as a murder mystery.
Who found this blog interesting and who tuned it out? I try to think of topics each week that will be interesting for readers and am open to your suggestions.
I started the blog by interviewing people who led interesting lives, thinking that other people might enjoy that, but the weekly response from readers was underwhelming.
I also try to incorporate humor in the blog. Who enjoys the humor and who hates it?
In conclusion, I truly encourage all of you to travel as much as you can, since it opens your mind and your heart to new aspects of life and opens your heart to other people.
For those who cannot travel in person, I encourage you to read books about travel.
Thanks! Hope you have a good Valentine’s Day. If not, hope it doesn’t bug you.
Hi Carl! This was a fun read and interesting perspective!