Heaven's Wish to destroy all minds!

No, this is not about religion. It's about Math, and how a crazy guy named Aerostar taught me to look past the classroom.

You see, Math has always been my Achilles heel.

I never really appreciated the skill as my talents are primarily artistic. I'm not the best writer, my writing is rife with grammatical errors and spelling errors, but writing comes naturally to me. Math, however, for most of my school life, was something nobody could convince me I'd need.

Then some time in 98, I was hooked on FFT by my cousin. And I was a huge fan of the Holy Knights. Stasis Sword, Holy Explosion, etc. Couldn't get enough of TG cid, etc.

Thing was, I sucked at the game. I made it to Riovanes castle and without Agrias, I was absolutely crushed beneath Wiegraf's heel. I didn't see a normal way to beat Wiegraf's lightning sword. I had to start over as I couldn't beat him with the save I had, and I only had a single save file - inside the castle. I made it back to him and speed cheezed him. Beat the game, put it aside for a while.

Eventually I would start up a few new saves, tried the "single class challenge" for a few hours before I said screw it. I had a monitor set up in my bedroom and would play the game until I was too tired to play anymore, and pass out. Many mornings I awoke to find my camera spinning in circles in Mandalia Plains.

And then, a friend linked me Aerostar's mechanics handbook.

I recognized everything I'd been looking at in math class in this guide. I learned how and why some skills sucked. I went and farmed gear I'd always ignored before. I tried classes I never saw a point to trying. I was crunching numbers to try to find how to do the maximum possible damage.

And then it happened.

On his first turn in Riovanes, Ramza walked up and oneshotted Wiegraf.

It wasn't a lucky crit. I wasn't overlevel. I had done hours of number crunching, gear farming to pump the right stats, percentage mods, I put everything together and tested it, and when it came time, I put it to the test and my foes fell before me. I had taken regular classes and made them more powerful than the unique classes, sometimes using unique class abilities to make them far, far more potent than they ever should be.

All with hours of number crunching, applying everything from math class I had thought I would never use.

I would, however, never come to apply this newfound zeal for number crunching to my math class, and it continued to wtfpwn me all through school.

I'm reminded of this, as I'm doing math cram right now. I pulled out my old course materials and video lessons for algebra 1 and 2 to prepare for my entry exam in the distance learning college I'm signing up for. I'm trying desperately to build and rebuild a foundation of knowledge that I never properly built in school so that I can jump straight into college level math.

The weird thing is, as bad as I am at math, I really enjoy number crunching and programming.

Now I just have to learn to apply that zeal to my course material and I'm set. It's just messing with my mind. @_<