I have some advice for you. I know that unasked-for advice can be among the most unwelcome impositions, but for your sake I am hoping to preempt any thoughtless, or at last not fully thought out, decisions you might make about your future, given your propensity to leap before looking, your slightly overoptimistic sense of being able to accomplish anything you put your mind to, and that ever-prideful claim you like to make about being able to endure any hardship for at least a short period of time.

If you were thinking about taking a graduate-level summer school class in linear algebra while working full time, I might suggest that you think twice. Who knows: it may turn out that the class requires two hours of class time every evening, so that the only time you'd have to do your two to three hours of nightly homework would be after class, wedged in around shoveling some instant dinner into your mouth and walking the dog, who's been home alone for ten hours since you went to work in the morning. It may end up that you have to leave some studying undone every night so you can go to bed in time to get to work early because the class schedule you've chosen requires you to leave work before 4:00 pm every day. Now, if you've taken on this schedule, and your boss offers you a new job and a promotion, but warns you that there will be a period of time during which you'll actually be doing two jobs—the old one and the new one, while taking some additional time to train your replacement—perhaps, if this double-job time span should exactly overlap with your five-week summer school class, you should take a moment to think things through.

It's only five weeks, you may have thought, and knowing you, you'll be thinking you can endure anything for five weeks. You've told me a hundred times about that god-awful job you used to have, what, back in 1997? The one where you worked 60 hours a week without overtime, yada yada yada, hauling bags of asbestos and demolition debris all over Chicago in unsafe vehicles while your boss screamed at you on the two-way radio until the veins bulged out of his neck? I know that job, plus getting your best grades ever the year you lost both your parents, made you think that the jackboots of the world were naught but water off your back, in the case of this mixed metaphor "you" playing the role of a duck with regard to the behavior of the water.

And all those years in the gifted math program in junior high and high school, not to mention those three math essay awards they gave you in college, may have led you to believe that you were somehow preternaturally-abled in the mathematical arts. Recall, though, that the mathematics program at your "liberal arts" college rarely actually required that you demonstrate any real computational facility; its focus being more conceptual meant that you never really had to "calculate" anything before you punched holes in the proofs of, say, Lobachevsky, or the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper. You just had to follow and understand their notation. In Lobachevsky or EPR this wasn't so bad, but Gauss and Riemann did really throw you for a loop. Riemann threw a lot of people through a loop, though, given that he tended to write like this:

I have in the first place, therefore, set myself the task of constructing the notion of a multiply extended magnitude out of general notions of magnitude. It will follow from this that a multiply extended magnitude is capable of different measure-relations, and consequently that space is only a particular case of a triply extended magnitude. But hence flows as a necessary consequence that the propositions of geometry cannot be derived from general notions of magnitude, but that the properties which distinguish space from other conceivable triply extended magnitudes are only to be deduced from experience. Thus arises the problem, to discover the simplest matters of fact from which the measure-relations of space may be determined; a problem which from the nature of the case is not completely determinate, since there may be several systems of matters of fact which suffice to determine the measure-relations of space—the most important system for our present purpose being that which Euclid has laid down as a foundation. These matters of fact are—like all matters of fact—not necessary, but only of empirical certainty; they are hypotheses. We may therefore investigate their probability, which within the limits of observation is of course very great, and inquire about the justice of their extension beyond the limits of observation, on the side both of the infinitely great and of the infinitely small.

But that's beside the point. This math class for which you've signed up may, in fact, require things of you that you've not really thought about or done since you were an engineering major, briefly, back in—what was it, 1991?—before you dropped out of college (the first time). In and of itself, that might be "doable," in the parlance of our times. But compounded with the situation at work that I mentioned previously, I suggest that perhaps you think twice before undertaking such nonsense. If it's not too late. It's not too late, is it?

O buddy O buddy! I'm so sorry about this! I wish I lived closer I could at least walk you Penny for you . . . We will all stand here in the shadows and applaude and cheer and keep our fingers crossed for you as you endure this grueling marathon.