Some thoughts on math, or why I'll never be an efficient waitress

My time in France has included two stints as a waitress, once in Paris, and once in Alba. In both places, the owners were my dear friends, and in both places, they teased me mercilessly about how slow I was at doing the checks, and how often I made mistakes.

They were right, and I was terrible, but I would like to take this opportunity to say that my problem was not mathematical, it was synesthetical.

People accept as a general truth that a nice thing about numbers is their universality.
And I am here to tell you, friends: that is one cruel misstatement of reality.

As a general rule, there's little difference in my head between French and English:
In both I can dream, swear, ruminate, babytalk, argue, bake, bargain, joke, gossip, and tease.

But hell if I can do math.

As long as I live, I will never be able get my head around the idea that
seven times eight (pictured up top)
and sept fois huit (pictured below)
both come out to 56.
How is that possible??
It will never, ever make sense to me.

Right there is the real reason I am self-employed: I can take all the time I need to make sure that cinquante-six and fifty-six really are the same thing. As you can see from the calculations pictured above, I'm still dubious.

What do you see in 583?

The photo to the right shows you the colors that appear in my head when I think about the number 583.

Nabokov called it "colored hearing."
Most people nowadays call it synaesthesia,
which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the
"production, from a sense-impression of one kind,
of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind." Right.

This is how I would explain it:

When I hear a sound, I see a color.
When I do mental math, I add colors together to get other colors.
When I smell cinnamon sticks, I see swirls of peacock blue and violet. (If you are wondering, cinnamon powder is paler; it includes terra cotta, yellow, and peach tones.)
When I taste a rice cake, it is pale blue marbled with pink and gray.

My synaesthesia is particularly strong when it comes to words. To spell the word "house" I do not think "h-o-u-s-e," I see, "fir green-transparent-pale gray-yellow-pale orange," and write that down.
But I don't like the word "house" much, since that color combination isn't too attractive. Furthermore, since my synaesthesia includes scent and texture, the word "house" trails an unpleasant smell produced by the combination of the yellow "s" and the green "h" - a musty, slightly acidic tang, like a lunchbox you left in the trunk overnight. For look and smell I prefer the scent and color of the French "maison." But for texture, "house" is smoother and more pleasant than "maison," which is warm and sticky.

I therefore find certain words totally intolerable, and others irrationally pleasing. The word "chalumeau" (French for blowtorch) makes me quite giddy, the way you might react to tasting an ethereal bonbon (see illustration). The word "stagflation," on the other hand, evokes in me the same nausea you might feel when scraping something putrid off the bottom of your shoe (I will spare you an illustration). I can barely stand to look at it on the page.

I only realized synaesthesia was a "condition" after stumbling on an article about it in a magazine - before that I thought that everyone's brains worked that way. To be honest, I still have trouble believing that they don't. So you tell me: does your brain work like mine? What does the number 583 evoke to you?