Nobody's perfect and I am nobody. There are some things in life I am good at and there are many other things I could not do to save my life. It is very frustrating when you don't get something.

No matter how hard you try, you cannot even come close to fathoming the day when the light bulb goes off in your head and you can actually understand what the hell you have attempted over and over again to figure out.

You know, it is that "Ooooohhhh, I get it" moment in life that leaves you with the ego the size of an elephant and the feeling that if you were to slap on a red cape, you too, could fly over buildings and only kryptonite would stand in your path.

The sad thing is there are some things, no matter how hard I stare at or study them, I will never understand, such as math.

Very few, if any, journalism majors out there understand the foreign language of mathematics. My math is so bad I have to break out the calculator when adding the tip to my total at a restaurant. I still count on my fingers and sometimes my toes when adding even the simplest of equations, and I don't always remember to carry the one.

It is sick, I know, but it is a disease and I am not alone on this math boycotting boat.

I use to feel inferior to those who knew what the answer was to the square root of one zillion and three, but now I am comfortable with my stupidity.

Why, you ask? I say this because of some advice my high school math teacher once gave my trigonometry class: "We need people in life who do not get it."

My teacher continued with her adoring advice, claiming we need people who don't get it in this world to clean pools and yards.

She said the people who don't get it are the same ones that help her take her groceries out to her car, ask her if she would like fries with that and starch her dry-cleaning just the way she likes it. These are just to name a few.

Although this sounds cruel and the jobs she mentioned are not bad in my opinion, she has a point. Not everybody can be good at everything. I can't be a math genius as well as a journalism genius. Okay, so maybe I am not a journalism genius, but you get the point.

You can't have too many chefs in the kitchen, too many Indian chiefs in the tee-pee -- you know the drill. This is what separates me from you. I write news stories and you may be a general studies major, an engineering major, a professor, a rocket scientist or even, God help you, a math genius.

There are some things in life you may not get, that could be math, English or maybe even journalism. Either way, not understanding one thing leaves more room to excel in the other. It is OK if you don't get it because somewhere out there somebody does. Oh, and if you get math, give me a call. I need someone to do my taxes.

Hillary Edman is a senior journalism major from Shreveport and serves as a news editor for The Tech Talk. E-mail comments to

hedman1060@aol.com.