Conversation

With permanent marker thursday night, I watched as the ink of these words seeped into my pores, and  spidered out in tiny overflowing smudges on my right hand:

"In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
under the bludgeoning of chance
my head is bloody, but unbowed."

It is the second paragraph of "Invictus." I want to memorize it, so I can recite it in times of distress, to remember my strength.

Friday I was in AP Calc. That sterile, boring classroom is a complete drag. Despite the taunting posters littered like flotsam across the walls that say "Math is FUN!" math is not fun. Who cares what the rate is of the radius of a a circle created by a stone dropped into a lake? Hmm, no one.

My palms, always loyal in times of distress, are sweating like two pigs that just got off the treadmill. My paper is wet, but I manage to finish the quiz. I drop it in the yellow stack accumulating on the corner of Mr. __'s desk and hand him my calculator. We are getting new programs, I'm so excited, I think it might be Christmas.

Randomly, slightly incredulously,  he asks me, "Did you get a tattoo?" His eyes are focused on the pink curves of my TI-84, but I can see the judgy glare below the lowered eyelids.

This is strait up weird. I have probably conversed with my math teacher three times. Sometimes I pass through a whole block and realized I haven't opened my mouth. It's not that I am overly shy, I just have no friends in that class and math is shit.

"Errmm... No." I say with a little fake awkward laugh.

"Oh, good. I was just wondering about that." And he hands me my calculator with a small smile.

I don't really know why this tiny conversation phased me so much. I guess I feel invisible in Calc, so it was kind of a shock to know that people, and my teacher, see me. But mostly, why would he care? What if it was a tattoo? Would he be more apt to scrawl those tiny red -2's, -1's on my tests? Or maybe he just has a tattoo thing. My grandpa hates tattoos with the fiery passion of the flames of hell, perhaps Mr.__ is the same.

We are all visual creatures. The vision part of every human brain is proportionally the largest. This shows that everyone ( even the most genial of us) inadvertently judge others based on physical appearance, what is manifested in front of our eyes. I shouldn't be surprised by it.