Monday, July 25, 2011

Post 38

Date a Mathematician

(after reading Chris Warnke's "You Should Date an Illiterate Girl")

Date a mathematician because he is unfamiliar with how things like dating are done nowadays and so he will bind himself to archaic chivalry. He will open doors and pull out chairs and offer you his jacket if you look cold. He will not staunch your tears with platitudes but he will give you a shoulder and a tissue. He will call your father "sir" until he is asked to stop. He will write halting, sincere letters. He will apologize. He may cut his spaghetti.

Date a mathematician because you will never be his muse. He will take you off the pedestal and make popcorn.

Date a mathematician because he will drink in the curve of your smiles and frowns, the angles of your elbows, and the sinusoidal sway of your hips. He will not compare your freckles to stars in the sky, but he will think of scatterplots and smile to himself. He will lack the vocabulary to express the magnitude and direction of his sentiments, so he will make vectors from his eyes and tell you he is speechless. He will explore the topology of your skin, inquisitive fingertips tracing your contours.* He will recognize your patterns, your causality, and remember them. He will amuse himself by synchronizing his breathing with yours when you are folded against him.

Date a mathematician because he will show you unfinished work eagerly.

Date a mathematician because he equates simplicity with elegance and beauty. He will have late nights at work, red-rimmed and drooping, but he will always always smile to see you. He will know which note should come next, even if he cannot sing it. He will light up when he explains that two asymptotic lines grow infinitely close and never intersect. He will describe fractals by saying that every part contains the whole, and then draw a crude one to reinforce his words.

Date a mathematician because he look up a recipe online to surprise you with cookies, and when you come in and see him chiseling the lumps of dough from the baking sheet, he will raise eyebrows full of flour and laugh.

*Date a mathematician because contours were math's domain, before literature swept in like a magpie to feather its nest.

3 comments:

  1. Me gusta mucho. This is very well written.

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  2. Thank you! I recommend you read "You should date an illiterate girl," it's a different tone and beautifully done.

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  3. This is all true.

    Also, how come you didn't tell me you had a blog and I had to find out from Kady's blogroll?

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