Changing majors

When I was in Saint Louis in January my sister and I had an interesting conversation about careers. One of my sister’s chief complaints about our mother is that she wasn’t exactly what you’d call encouraging. This is true, with a couple of exceptions. The two exceptions are two of my brothers. Both of them were quite good at two things my mother thought were important: math and art. She encouraged them accordingly, and it was from her that they learned – and learned well, for they were both A students – that they were, are and will forever be superior. “He is simply above-average in intelligence,” she told me about one of my brothers. If by “intelligence” we mean working through trigonometry at the speed of hot lightening and being able to do charcoal sketches of Abraham Lincoln, then yes, that’s a true statement.

There is lots of bitterness and sibling rivalry in what I’m writing here, obviously, because when it comes to math, I got stuck, really stuck, with the business about multiplying two negative numbers and ending up with a positive one, and from there I never progressed. I wasn’t good at math. In fact, I was really bad at it. But in addition to the bitterness there is a bit of justice. These two brothers of mine – one of whom is in his early 40s, the other in his early 50s – never bothered to get a second opinion. Or if they did get one, they didn’t listen to it, and as a result they are both insufferable, because being better than everyone around you at all times is a lonely, painful way to live, and as we all know, misery isn’t something to horde. I should pity them, rather than sketching out revenge tactics. I’m working on it.

In the meantime, trashing them is fun. When I was talking to my sister the topic of the younger of the two superior brothers came up. He wrote an e-mail to our mother shortly before she died and told her that I was one of the most boring people he knew because I’d been talking about my job. My sister and I had a good laugh over that one in January. “What the fuck,” she said. We were outside smoking cigarettes, out of earshot of the youngsters. “I guess it’s easy to call someone boring for talking about his job … when you don’t have one.” Though he’s issued forth two consumers of resources and “bought” a house that cost more than a quarter of a million dollars, my brother hasn’t had a job since 2006. He lives off his wife and (I presume) his in-laws. So anyone who mentions his or her job and takes a break from participating in conversations (as a listener, primarily) about his children is boring. If that’s intelligence, please, sign me up for illiteracy.

So speaking of “boring,” my sister was carrying on about how precious little encouragement was offered by our mother. I asked what she thought she might have done differently had that motherly encouragement been forthcoming. She told me that looking back on it, had she known then what she knows now, she would have become a pharmacist. A pharmacist? My sister reviews and makes determinations on the cases of people who have applied for a very specific type of assistance, so I asked her what appealed to her about being a pharmacist. “I think it would be interesting,” she said, “and I think I’d be good at it.” And it’s a crime, she went on, that our mother – who majored in biology and chemistry – did not help steer her in this direction.

I never asked our mother what she thought of me majoring in reading books and, believe it or not, she didn’t offer much commentary on the subject. But I’ve thought about it a bit since January, and I have decided that if I were to go back to 1984 for a redo, I would not have majored in English but in economics. I realize this probably constitutes being boring, but I think money is interesting. The lying and cheating and stealing and killing done in the name of money is phenomenal. It’s almost like sex that way. And I think, furthermore, that I could overcome my numbers issue. I am betting, in fact, that in the realm of economics negative numbers stay that way until they are enhanced not with another negative number but with a positive one. As in, the more money you lose, the more money you lose. It’s not like you’re suddenly ahead by the amount – and then some – by which you were previously behind. That kind of monkey business is for those who excel at math.

But I think the main thrust of my interest in learning about money is that it’s so truthful. Sooner or later, lingering behind and beneath the stories we’ve all come to believe there is some cash. Entire nations and kingdoms and empires do the craziest shit to get their hands on some more. That’s where my love of reading comes in. Would I trade that in to study the ledgers? I don’t think I’d have to. I could spend the rest of my life reading about money, because that’s where the real narrative is, I think, to the extent that the story of money makes history books look like bedtime stories. If someone can show me a narrator of this country that’s more honest than the national checkbook, I’ll sign up for basic algebra and learn to really understand how multiplying two negatives yields a positive.