Don't You Wish You'd Gone to Med School?

High school math was sheer, absolute, misery. Torture, really. I spent many hours agonizing over problems, late into the evening. Around ten every evening, I'd still be plugging away at it, and "Easy Street", a CBC radio program that featured classic jazz. I don't remember much about how to plot a sine, tangents, or functions, but I did acquire a taste for John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Ella Fitzgerald.

The torture was heightened by the fact that if I wanted to escape Winnipeg, and enjoy that sort of high-brow, artsy lifestyle associated with the likes of Messrs Davis and Coltrane, I'd need cash to do it. A lot of cash. The kind of cash that only math skills can bring. Unfortunately, in grade twelve, I had to bite the bullet and take what I thought was the more practically oriented (and easier) math course to meet my high school graduation requirements.

Balancing checkbooks, and figuring out the difference between my gross income and net income was the best I'd ever be able to do. I took my "B+" or "A-", and was just happy that I wouldn't have to go to summer school to get my diploma. A sense of failure still gnawed at me, and the future, which had always looked as bleak as a Manitoba sky on a cold winter's day, looked even harsher in the light of that compromise.

The perks that I'd come to associate with being a professional like Mr. Rockwell - the only CPA in a small town our family had briefly lived in - vanished from my sight: the big house, the go to hell utility vehicles, cable television, trips to Disneyland, and a little disposable income for the memorabilia associated with the little distractions we all love. In Mr. Rockwell's case, it was the Montreal Expos, for me, it was, and still is...comic books, strips, animation. Any kind of commercial illustration really.

I wanted to be in business like my father and Mr. Rockwell, but Dad had drilled it into my head that retail was not the best way to do it. It's a good game when you are young, and have a lot of energy, but it progressively gets harder as you get older. I made feeble attempts to break into journalism, but in all honesty, it was like aspiring to be a rock star, and well, I certainly would be enjoying a much more...frugal lifestyle if I'd actually succeeded.

That failure to finish out the higher level math course gnawed at me over the years, but had almost disappeared entirely by the time I'd written my LSAT. For the first time in my life I had a real metric for my intelligence. I could point to a quantifiable, measurable score, and not just drop the names of a bunch of dead writers nobody had ever heard of into a conversation as a means of asserting my intellectual bona fides.

I wasn't able to get into law school, but eventually, I was able to break out of the education track and into business, and enjoy some of the perks that Mr. Rockwell enjoyed. I want to hold on to those perks however, and get more of them, and to do that I need a bigger salary and bigger bonuses. I signed up to take one of the prerequisites for an accounting certificate.

To my surprise, it uses the kind of math that I became familiar with from what I thought was the "Easy A" high school course. After three weeks in the accounting course, I've come to realize that the math being used in that high school course wasn't so easy after all. It's a lot of hard work, but I've done fairly well on the assignments so far.

I might just be a little bit brighter than I thought I was.