It's All in the Numbers

As I write this, I am vaguely aware that 89 days have slipped through my fingers already this year.  This leaves 276 dinners yet to think about, 140 lunches to pack for my son’s deluge of daily dietary delight until the end of the calendar year, and dozens of eggs to crack.  Only 139 days left before my pubescent adolescent hits the mystical magical age of teenage reckoning and 240 days before my love muffin and I hit 17 years of wedded bliss (which leaves him 239 days and 23 hours before the light bulb in his conscious zone will actually go off and the thought of shopping for a small bauble of love and affection to purchase with the adequate amount of adoration and adulation associated with such an occasion will occur to him).

I get up at 5AM and go to sleep at 9:30PM.  Dealing with the usual 24/7 and only a mere 168 hours a week that I have to work with leaves me 115.5 hours a week to try to accomplish something, anything, which will validate my being, leaving me only merely 52.5 hours of beauty rest, which is far from enough.  Something is amiss in these statistics – somehow they must have gotten reversed.

There are 950 calories in a medium sized chocolate chip cookie dough Dairy Queen Blizzard and 480 calories amassed within an In-and-Out Cheeseburger with onions (an order of fries sneaks up on you with another 400 calories, which of course you must have, because… well, just because it is a tasty treat combo that you cannot do without).  A Krispy Kreme traditional doughnut is a mere 220 calories in comparison, but I have never met a living being who can stop at just one.  Now I am depressed, since walking will only eliminate 100 calories per 60 minutes, I would have to walk back and forth to New York at least three times to justify any of the basic food group of chocolate my body demands I give it – but I think it is worth it.

There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar, and a “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. S ome people spend their beloved awake time in the most unusual way, as evident when an astute individual realized that the year 1961 can be written both upside down and right side up, and still appear the same; this won’t be possible again until 6009.  Little known numeral announcements also intrigue and captivate when it became known that people photocopying their buttocks are the cause of 23% of all photocopier errors worldwide, cockroaches break wind every 15 minutes, 1 in 5,000 north Atlantic lobsters are born bright blue, and a 10-gallon hat actually only holds about 3/4 gallon.

We are a 298,000,000 people nation of number lovers and digit divas.  We have house numbers, phone numbers and keep track of how minutes we have left on our cell plans.  We calculate MPH, MPG and we know that a Ferrari 355 F1 has horsepower to kill over a Ford Escort because the 0-60 in 4.6 seconds and the $134,000 price tag tells us so.  Scales keep track of pounds lost or gained and scoreboards know who wins or loses.  Monthly statements are a myriad of facts, figures and the reality of countless dollars spent.  We count down the time until our two-week vacation will arrive and we know if you call certain friends it will be at least a 45-minute conversation.

It all adds up, as calculating as these nasty numerals, that are known to creep up on the credulous, can be, I know we can count on them as well.

(I leave you with one for the “put this in your pipe and smoke it” category…)
111, 111, 111 x 111, 111, 111 = 12, 345, 678, 987, 654, 321.

Cynthia A. McClelland, curious observer of the obvious with interpretations of the oddities of daily life.  Mother, wife and lover of the furry, resides in the north Lake Tahoe area.

Cynthia A. McClelland © 2003-