I'm a word person, not a numbers person. Anyone who knows me even slightly knows at least this about me.

I can live with the thought of coming up with 86 blog posts per month in addition to the other sentences I'm expected to string together in the course of my work and regular life, and have even been known to spend time writing just for fun and my own amusement. (I talk for those same reasons most of the time.)

Some numbers I'm fine with, oddly enough. Phone numbers, for example, I remember for decades, and even after living outside the US for thirteen years, I can pick up the phone and dial most of my friends and many family members without needing a second thought.

But ask me to calculate or tabulate, then sit back and watch as my eyes dim and my brain activity screeches to a halt total enough to give a flat-line reading on an ECG.

This aversion gets in my way often, and I don't at all like this flaw in my character, hole in my brain, wigged-out-weird-math-avoidance-thing ... whatever. It sticks with me, though, no matter what I do to try to overcome the handicap.

In college, successful negotiation of statistics classes was a prerequisite for my course of study, and just about killed me. I can clearly recall spending six or more hours working away at one problem, finally experiencing the 'ah ha!' moment that let me finish it, then realizing immediately that 'ah ha' had already faded to 'huh?' before I'd even set my pencil down. (I went through exactly the same process when I read Stephen Hawking's book, 'A Brief History of Time.') Even when I get it, I don't get it.

My thought process seems to reject numbers in much the same way a Prom Queen deals with requests for dates from members of the chess club; they can approach, but the reason for their existence isn't apparent, so they're not really seen, and certainly never remembered.

Continued ...