Story Sent in by Aurelio:
Betty's profile mentioned that she had undergone brain surgery in her late teens. I asked her about it in one of our intro messages and she said that it was done to open up a blocked blood vessel, although it had certain unintended "side effects." She didn't expound upon what those side effects were, but I was soon to find out.
On our first date I took her to a bar conveniently located by a train stop. She told me, "They removed the blockage but then they mistook me for a transplant patient and accidentally spliced another brain onto my first one."
I said, "I don't think they do brain transplants."
She said, "Me neither, but now I basically have two brains. I'm serious. Ask me a math problem. Anything. The harder the better."
I said something like, "What's 113 times 58 divided by 18.4?"
She fired back, after mere moments, "About 356."
I did the math on my phone's calculator, as I did not have two brains. She was right. But that didn't mean she had two brains.
"I have bad headaches sometimes," she explained, "But it's otherwise pretty helpful."
I asked, "How is there space in your head for two brains?"
"They just crammed it in there," she said, then added, "I sometimes remember things that never happened to me. Residual effects of the second brain. The memories are from a war, like Vietnam or something. So it's like having PTSD from things that've never really happened to me! Look out! Charlies in the trees!"
She laughed long and hard at that. I joined in as much as I was able to fake it. She then asked me to test her on more math problems, which became tiresome after another minute.
When the check came, she glanced at the amount and instantly calculated the tip. What a handy thing it must have been, having two brains. Anyway, I didn't go out with her again.
You should have asked her to draw a diagram of how the two brains fit inside her skull. Would have been fun to see her work out that math problem. At least she didn't keep the second one in a jar in her purse.
ReplyDeleteOn a side note: I had a Structures professor back in college that could do complex math problems in his head faster than the whole class could get the answer on a calculator. He could give you the answer to five or six decimal places. It was incredible! And he looked like Super Mario so, double win!
(...of course Archie beats me to the "Man with Two Brains" reference...)
ReplyDeleteMaybe she needed to take out that second brain and put it back in the bowl? Or maybe she had Abby Normal's brain?
@Archie - my high school math teacher, all the way up through and including calculus, didn't let us use a calculator in class. He was one of those "show all your work, no calculators" kind of guys. Only when we worked with functions (sin, cos, sqrt, log, etc) did he let us bring them in. I guess he got us better at doing math in our heads. I still don't know what 113 times 58 divided by 18.4 is though.
@ Tourist - Love the Young Frankenstein reference! "I ain't got no body!"
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