Words are inadequate

I'm awful at the super-basic stuff and the calculus & beyond. The bits in the middle, which require thinking rather than memorization, and equations you can re-deduce by examining the problem (and therefore that I don't have to memorize...) always worked well for me.

The problem with being a mathematician in this day and age is that all the easy/interesting stuff has already been worked out, and you are left with increasingly complex abstractions. My mother, who was a math major in college (mainly so that her children's lit class would count towards graduation, I kid you not) would have made an excellent engineer, whereas my father, from whom I got my appalling lack of mathematical clerical ability, was an engineering major but would have made a better abstract mathematician.