Yesterday I wrote about practicing, habit formation and my personal-world laboratory experience where practicing did not help my math skills. Today brought even more mathematical confusion as I went to research the topic I'd selected to write about and discovered that three is really four......or is it four is really three?
I poked fun at myself over the weekend as I grew uber frustrated with all of the paperwork I was (an am continually) flooded with from a committee/team I serve on. This phenomenon of paper proliferation is problematic on lots of committees and two teams I serve on have a tendency to produce enough paper to provide wallpaper that would cover more than a dozen powder rooms monthly - or so it seems. A first there was just enough paper to be corralled by a small paper clip, which morphed to a big paper clip, which morphed to one of those giant butterfly clips, which morphed into needing a file folder, which is heading towards needing a three-ring binder.
But the problem didn't just stop there. Every week I would receive more paper and, when needing to locate a particular document or a revision of a document (We are overridden with revisions.) I would be rifling through dozens of paper pages. I got smart and starting dating my paperwork, which helped for a bit. Then I found even more intelligence regarding paper proliferation and started stapling like-themed handouts together.......until this past weekend when I declared war on paper. One committee's work is almost over and I am resigned to accepting the state in which its paperwork resides, but the other committee/team will be ongoing for some time and I desperately needed some organization.
I turned to an old, practiced habit that works for this old dog..................a thirty-year-old leather, three-ring binder, a three-hole punch, and those old-fashioned category dividers. I sat myself down on the floor, sorted all of the papers into piles, threw out well over seventy-five percent of the papers, and settled in to my organization mode. When I was finished, I marched over to Capt. SO, thrust the old but good-looking binder in his face and said, "I may not be organized but I'll appear to be. I'm just like 'Super Skier'".
Now, if you don't know who "Super Skier" is, you are missing out on one of the great folk songs of the 1960's. Written by Bob Gibson and performed by the Chad Mitchell Trio, Capt. SO's trio performed it dozens of times as a part of their repertoire when they were together as "The Sound Investment Trio" in the 1970's and 1980's. The song details a man who wants to ski, doesn't ski very well but has all of the best ski clothing money can buy. He hits the slopes and, unfortunately, hits a tree. Half of him goes one way and the other half moves in the opposite direction. But, he looked real good.
I felt like "Super Skier" on Sunday and, hopefully, will every week at my team meeting. Remembering the song, I went online this morning to research the piece and was met with a very vexing image. Every picture I could find of the Chad Mitchell Trio shows four performers with the group. Please understand that, to this feeble-minded mathematician, this concept of three being four is highly confusing.
Or is it that four is really three?
Help!
Ancora imparo
