Numbers Game

When I was in high school, I practiced an amateur and adolescent form of numerology, something loosely adapted from a bit in a women's magazine. (A magazine I probably skimmed in 1984 at the laundromat while my grandmother stood nearby using quantities of bleach that would likely require HazMat clearance were she to use them today.)

I remember that the system assigned numerical value to each letter (based on its place in the alphabet--so A was 1 and Z was 26) and you figured out a person's numerical essence (or whatever) by adding up the letters in his or her name and then adding all the digits together and repeating until you were left with one digit. So, for example, the letters in my name added up to 276 and 2 + 7 + 6 =  15  and 1 + 5 = 6. So, my number was six.

There was, I think, some sort of chart in that long-ago article to indicate which numbers were more "compatible" with one another, but I never really paid much attention to it and instead developed my own (self-serving) system that reliably backed up whatever it was I already believed about the person whose numbers I was running. The fact that Mr. High School and I shared the same essential number was proof of both our supernatural connection and the validity of this style of numerology. (Later, though I had mostly outgrown my personal numerological compulsions by that point, I couldn't help myself from boiling Hubby down to his numerical essence and reasoned that a "4" would be compatible with a "6" because we were both "even" numbers.)

I compulsively ran the numbers for myself and every crush I had for several years along with numbers for my friends and their respective crushes. I do not use that term "compulsively" lightly. I did it so often that I memorized the numerical position of every letter of the alphabet and to this day, that useless bit of trivial knowledge still takes up space in my brain, which is why when I saw the "M" on my calendar this morning for today's post, I thought to myself, "M is 13 and 13 is halfway there."

M is for Mumbo Jumbo