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This story is dredged from the depths of my memory, and is one of my favorites about myself. I don't particularly remember it happening, but it's been corroborated enough times for me to believe it. It's the kind of story you can't make up. Way back when I was but a wee young lad, only five or six, my brother tried to teach me math. Ben is two and a half years older than me, and for years I thought he was the academic bees knees. Heck, I still think he's the academic bee's knees, especially when it comes to math. He majored in math. He's a math wizard. He's positively mathemagical, and has always been so. I was moderately mathematically inclined, but never even approached his precociousness. Ben's gift for navigating the exact and exacting work of complex mathematical theory boggles me. And like his craft, he is a very precise individual. So this was the person trying to teach elementary math to his little brother with the attitude and energy level of a coke-addled bumblebee. The particular concept he was trying to teach me that fine evening was the idea of zero. As pervasive as the theme of nothingness is in popular culture, trying to pin it down into a concrete mathematical concept was nigh impossible for my 1st grade brain. I was totally up for learning about zero, but the thoughts that flitted through my head were rocket fuel and Ben was just giving me water. Essential, but so much more boring. And as the lesson got longer and longer, my distractedness (read: irresistible creativity) began to wear on him and eventually he snapped.
He huffily raised his two hands, the fingers curving to form two zeroes. "If you add this," he grumped, indicating his left hand, "to this [indicating his other hand] what do you get?" As simple as could be. 0+0=0. Surely there was no way I could mess it up. But I always specialized in playing Godzilla with Ben's perfectly crafted plans. I held up my two hands, mimicking his, in two zeroes. I contemplated them for a moment, before stacking them on top of each other and excitedly shouting "Eight!" Ben glared at my insubordination (read: indomitable genius), but I wasn't done. In a move of sheer brilliance, I shifted the arrangement from vertical to horizontal, put it to my face, and delivered my coup d'grace. "Binoculars!" That was me when I was six. 0+0=Binoculars. I'm happy to say not much has changed.
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