Möbius Trip.

In school, I was always proud of myself for not being particularly mathematically challenged. I mean, the world knows that us brown people have conquered the numbered universe heuristically. It was an epiphany to the West whose only recourse to analytics three centuries earlier were the physiologically-suited mathematicians at Göttingen. I remember when we were shown scribbles on the blackboard and asked to differentiate such-and-such w.r.t. such-and-such or calculate the number of permutations estimated when a monkey is dismembered (okay, maybe, that last was absurd), and I remember me not scribbling the said scribbles into my spiral-bound pad because I was solving the telltale equations in my head, and declaring the answers dismissively, looking at a female classmate out of the corner of my eye, to see if she so much as twitched or showed a hint of approval. The teachers wanted to slap me because, to them, my existence was as gross and incomprehensible as the 'praying' of a praying-mantis.

So, two years later, when a rather irritable feminist supervisor in her twenties, asks me to 'do the math' over a handful of lattes and macaroons, all I can think of are Leibnitz' integrals, Cantor set theory and dyscalculia. Veritable fallacy, uh huh.