Really mad!

So a public blog may or may not be the right place to vent my frustration, but here goes:

There is a math competition starting in Hungary on Wednesday and running through November 3rd. I didn't know about it until the other master's student mentioned it to me last Tuesday. Apparently when the professor in charge of us both had come by our office several times the previous week to see if Baldur was in, it was to tell him about the competition. Both of us agreed that it was strange for him not to have mentioned it to me as well, but I tried not to think about it too hard. I'm busy, the Putnam was a disaster, I've never liked math competitions, yadda yadda yadda.

Then this morning the German foreign exchange student asked me if I was participating and I got mad about it all over again, so I cornered the professor and asked him to fill me in. He did, though reluctantly. "The problems are very tough." "Yes, obviously, or it wouldn't be a very good math competition." Or, "You have to know a lot of math -- (rattling off a list of things he knows I don't know anything about) and be quite clever."

So he made a judgement call about my background and my intelligence! Great.

The most irritating thing about this is that I really do hate math competitions and that he is right insofar as I'm not familiar with a lot of stuff that would be necessary to do well. Nonetheless, I don't appreciate getting the edited version of events, you know? I really, really hate this aspect of math.