After quite a while of contemplation, I have come to the realization that my “ideal woman” simply does not exist. I know, shocker of the century, right there.

The problem is, I don’t quite understand why she would not exist out there, somewhere. I just haven’t the foggiest clue how to begin the search for her.

My ideal woman would be willing to spend a Friday night at home, watching scary movies until passing out on the couch. We could even spend an entire Saturday or Sunday beating each other at video games. She would be content with a “date” of getting ice cream and then talking about Math, Politics, Science, Philosophy, or any other intellectual topic and have it be considered great fun. She would willingly come along to (and possibly even participate in) Magic the Gathering drafts with me. We would spend hours at home, bonding over some television show, like The Office, Avatar: TLA, or Breaking Bad, just enjoying each other’s company.

Maybe I’m the crazy one, here, thinking that someone like that must exist somewhere. Someone who would not be offended if I allowed her to pay for her own ice cream cone. Someone who would legitimately appreciate me simply listening to things she said and remembering them weeks later when they become relevant again. But, well, I guess those kinds of girls only exist in Romantic Comedies.

That won’t stop me from looking, though, of course.

A discussion I had a week ago with a good friend of mine enlightened me to a peculiar trend among ignorant first and second-year college students who tend to gawk and cry at how Calculus 2 [Involving primarily Integration and Infinite Series of Real Numbers, including Taylor and Maclaurin expansions] is the hardest Calc. She pointed something out to me which makes a lot of sense.

Anyone who thinks Calc 2 is the hardest Calc simply must have stopped there. If they had not and they had gone on to Calculus 3 (multivariable calculus), they would have met multiple integrals, partial derivatives, the multivariable chain rule, and such enjoyable theorems as Green’s, Stokes’, and Divergence. How anyone can claim that finding the Taylor expansion for sinx is more difficult or involved than finding the volume contained between two surfaces in three-dimensional space is beyond me.

Then past that you would meet Calc 4 (Ordinary Differential Equations) where you are forced to actuallyuseyour Calc 2 concepts and apply them to more difficult situations in order to solve complicated differential equations (an equation involving derivatives of varying degrees which must be satisfied by the target function) using separation of variables, integrating factors, and, the most dreaded power series expansion method of solution. Yeah.

And then there’s Calc 5. Partial Differential Equations. It’s basically Calc 4 on speed. Now you are looking at equations involving the partial derivatives of a single function of multiple variables and are trying to find solutions which satisfy them.

So go ahead and claim that Calc 2 is so hard, because, let’s be honest now, it totally is. But you’d better check yourself next time before you go off and use that -est suffix and be perfectly certain there is no Calculus harder than what you’re doing, because, trust me, there is.