My advisers called me in from Yu-Gi-Oh hour to have a meeting about my cabinet’s 28-percent approval rating. My irritation at the interruption was tempered by the cute way they sat around the table, foreheads wrinkled and pencils tapping. The thing is though, there is really nothing to worry about. During my high-school math class, I had a motto: Turn that parabolic frown upside down. It didn’t matter if the parabola was on paper, in a textbook or on the blackboard, I would have that thing turned upside down by lunchtime. When you are best friends with the class vice president, you can get these things done. Mathematics is about numbers (and in trickier cases, the letter x) coming together to form a beautiful truth. And the beauty right here is my approval rating.

I stood up amidst my advisors’ mumbling and foot shuffling and said, “Hey! We’re a country of 128 million people! What’s 28 percent of that?” They whipped out their Casio pocket calculators in unison and came to a number near 37 million.

That’s 37 million people who think we’re doing A-OK! I emphasized my point over lunch at Burger King when I got up on the counter and asked how many people in the shop approved of Tetsuo’s job on tray washing duty. I personally counted only 24 hands in the air. Not exactly 37 million, is it?