Upside-down parabolas

Well, in the last week we have gotten to that point where a trip to the grocery store is a do-or-die exigency. (thanks, dictionary.com) As I was wandering about the store aimlessly, tossing food into my cart, I began to notice a pattern emerging.

We eat like little kids.

Going back to the first week of our marriage, I baked casseroles for Geoff every single day, until finally he said, "You know, you don't HAVE to cook for me like this." That was pretty much the last time I ever made a meal. Now we just grab what we can when we can. If Geoff had been shopping with me tonight, we might've bought better food but probably not (sometimes he picks out food he likes but mostly he just follows me around slowly and looks at stuff). With the exception of the spaghetti sauce and the frozen veggies that cook inside the bag, everything I bought tonight is 100% lunchbox or after-school-snack worthy. I suppose one day we'll grow up and be... well, grown up, when it comes to food. (Or we'll just have more time to care.)

Anyhow, tonight in calculus, we learned how to use derivatives to compute marginal profit. I wanted to kill Mr. Professor for attempting to bring business into it. Math is not supposed to be relevant to anything!! He then drew the graph on the board, which was an upside-down parabola (like rainbow-shaped for anyone who hasn't had a math class in awhile), and a kid toward the front got so confused... how could selling more of something reduce your marginal profit?? he asked. I immediately recognized it as the principle of "diminishing returns" (learned in microeconomics) but didn't say anything. To the kid's question, the professor merely answered, "I don't know anything about business, I just know how to get the numbers that's all."

Aha! I reveled in silent victory. I knew exactly what the graph meant, while Mr. Professor, the formidable math genius, couldn't begin to explain it. It was vindicating proof that math alone (at least calculus) is useless in the real world. (I'm pretty sure that no one sits around and uses derivatives to come up with marginal profit; there are other ways to figure that out). Of course, my silent victory was short-lived when we moved on to the next section and I was lost again. And it's kind of pathetic that it occured at all, really. I guess those are just the thoughts that go through a girl's head when she realizes she could've gotten this class out of the way back in high school and didn't. But who really had a clue what it would mean back then anyway?

ANYWAY. I seem to have ADD. Goodnight.

..... And now that I think of it, it might actually be the "law" of diminishing returns.... oh well. The concept is the same.