Where have all the neurons gone?

When I was little, I basically only watched two shows on TV. Every day, my friend next door, Andrew, would either meet me at his place or mine and we would watch 'The Brady Bunch' together. I've seen every episode. It's a pretty lame show, really... but even then, I liked the way life worked out in neat little 30-minute packages. The other show that I watched religiously was 'Hotline Math'. It was an afternoon show on public access tv with a slick, balding man in a sportscoat who would help callers solve their difficult homework math problems. What made it funny was that these were middle- and high-school students, and I was in first grade. Every day, they would have a challenge problem, and the first caller with the correct answer won a prize. One time, I WON!! They sent a calculator to my school, and the principal announced my win (and thus, my superior intelligence hehe) to the whole school during the morning announcements. I got to leave class (I know, it's very exciting, isn't it?) and go up to the office to claim my prize. That crappy calculator might have been worth a million dollars the way I felt about it. Years later, I spotted that slick, sportscoated man after church one day and literally ran over yelling, "Oh my goodness! YOU'RE MR. MATH!!!" It was a little embarrassing because no one else had ever seen the show. He even seemed a little shocked. I don't think he'd ever had a fan before.
When I was in third grade, my dad was a teacher at my school. This could have been a total nightmare, but my dad is actually very, very cool so it worked in my favor. He had a couple of students that were struggling with some of the math material, and I ended up being a tutor for one of them. What makes this funny, is that he taught seventh grade. And I was in third. This didn't go over so well with a couple of my classmates, but I didn't care because I was totally IN with all of the hot seventh grade guys. Ok, I wasn't IN at all, but it felt like I was... and I thought I was super cool when our class would walk by, single-file, on our way to the lunch room and all of the super cool seventh graders would all say Hi to me. It was all just really super cool.

I'm telling you these stories to explain my frustration with the fact that I have become a total math retard. Something happened between third grade and now that completely dissolved every neural synapse in my brain that had anything to do with mathematics. It was a gradual process, as I remember it... I did well until ninth grade geometry when I struggled a bit. However, I blame that entirely on my teacher who happened to also be my PE teacher... who knew absolutely nothing about math. She would get tutored each week before she would come teach the class. I understood nothing of the geometry text, nor her robotic explanations. SO, I came up with my own way to solve the problems. I skipped vital postulates, ignored important hypotheses... but always got the right answer. She assumed I was cheating... I reported her to the school board. Ultimately I got a B, and invented a whole new, simpler form of geometry... which, sadly, I have forgotten in it's entirety, and thus am not a millionaire. Algebra was a little tougher, and upon discovering that I could not invent a new way to arrive at the correct answer, I panicked. I snuck by with a C or low B as I recall, but it was with extreme effort. During one of the first weeks of Algebra 2, I missed something. Something vital, something upon which every other thing we learned would be built. And I never quite figured that thing out... ever. When I begged my teacher for help I was informed that I was a student at a Preparatory school and I should be capable of figuring it out on my own. I apparently was not. I passed the mid-term because my teacher locked her keys in her filing cabinet and I made a deal with her that she wouldn't fail me if I got them out. I had never sprung a lock of any kind before, but I had also never failed a class... ultimately she got her keys and I got a D. I ended up failing the class anyway, but life changed for me during that year and it ended up not mattering.
These days I find that even the simplest math is painfully difficult, if not just very annoying. I would answer Pivot's question about what profession I would never like to attempt with a very emphatic 'Accounting'. The idea of having to crunch numbers all day makes me literally nauseated. Now, I am not as bad off as some... there are those that have difficulty even making change... but I'm afraid that I have given up all hope on improving my mathematical abilities at this point. I sure wish I had that calculator back...