The Pythagorean Theorem is never there when you need it. It walked out on us during the reign of Emperor Maximillian of Connecticut. Rumor has it, it’s living five kilometers south of the South Pole with a mute who can’t stop talking. The occasional child-support payments were coarse as a herd of beef stroganoff, the sour cream with a mechanical advantage of 3 and mushrooms digitized into 32-bit integers. None of this helped my English grades because I’ve always been colorblind with respect to adverbs. In those tender years, when my hormones subtended 3.5 minutes of arc, I found baseball denser than Glaswegians so I joined the introvert team. Our events were well attended by those occupied elsewhere.

Taking my newfound enthusiasm for apathy to college, I vowed to major in the discipline with the highest score in pentathlon. A torn Achilles tendon hobbled Literature and judges disqualified Mathematics for performance-enhancing drugs. Linguistics was first to cross the finish line so I enrolled in its intestinal tract. I survived on pots of instant syntax washed down with kegs of morphology but that steady diet of postmodernism gave my grade point average an ulcer. My health insurance came in third in the hundred-yard dash but didn’t have the stamina for the high jump, not to mention the hurdles. To make matters worse, my textbook told me it was pregnant.

I abandoned my dreams of a vegan Minkowski space and took a job as a Cobb salad. The days crowded next to bacon sweating ranch dressing gained me enough latitude to furnish my existentialism with Henry Miller chairs. After nine perpendiculars, my textbook birthed a jury trial named Appendix. Once I save enough decibels, we’ll travel south of the South Pole to meet its hypotenuse.