Numbers Shmumbers

About 10 years ago, I was deep in the throes of a mid-life crisis.

I was turning 35, and for some reason this was a really big deal to me. I walked around in a complete state of mope for several months, just sure that the good times were all past and I had nothing to look forward to except gray hair, cellulite and inevitable decline.

So the night before my birthday, I was working late... as I did pretty much every day back in "those days." It seemed unfair somehow that I should spend the last day of my youth chained to a desk dealing with paperwork, but there I was. Anyhow, I had to fill out some insurance forms and they asked for both the day's date and my date of birth. Somehow, seeing the two numbers there next to each other something didn't look right.

Now, I'm not really what you might call a "numbers person." For some reason, numbers and math just don't seem to stick too well in my slippery little brain, but I always thought that when you subtract two odd numbers, you should get an even number. So how could it be, that the current year and my birth year were both odd numbers, yet I KNEW I was turning 35. I started to feel like perhaps I was caught in some Twilight Zone reality, or a temporal distortion of sorts.

Finally, fearing that I had really lost my grip on reality, I grabbed an adding machine and actually did the math. And it turned out, that I wasn't turning 35 after all! Yes folks, in my zeal to find crisis at every turn, I had somehow gotten a year ahead of myself, and, in truth, I was only turning 34!

Oh my...

Soooooo..... flash forward to last week. I was lying in bed trying to recall if I had remembered to take my birth control pill or not. I try to make it part of my nighttime routine, but since "routine" isn't exactly my strong suit, I have been known to forget it on occasion.

Too lazy to get up and actually check, I lay there trying to visualize the package. I clearly remembered seeing that all the pills had been taken through Thursday. But this didn't really help, because I couldn't actually remember what day of the week it was!

So then, I figured I'd go at it from the numbers point of view. I knew that Valentine's day was the 14th and it was on Tuesday, so I'd just count backwards from there. Now, I remembered seeing that it was the 10th so... 14 Tuesday, 13 Monday, 12.... Wait a minute, I thought. that can't be right! It can't be the 10th already because that would mean that my birthday had already passed. 

But I clearly remembered seeing blog posts that were dated the 10th, so it had to be right. But how could that be? How could I have forgotten my own birthday? And not only that, nobody else had remembered my birthday either! Seriously? Did my entire family actually forget my birthday? And what about CatMan... he NEVER forgets!

So, I was lying there trying to decide whether I should be offended by this or not. I mean, after all, how upset could I really be when I myself had forgotten? But seriously, I started to feel a bit like the girl in 16 Candles.

Then, just about the time I had decided that it didn't really matter and I wasn't upset about everybody forgetting my birthday, it hit me...

Oh wait... my birthday's not until March.

Oh. My. God.

Perhaps this is the sort of thing I was fearing back in my mid-life crisis 10 years ago. You know, the "inevitable decline" part?

I mean, heaven help me if I ever get hit on the head and some doctor tries to give me one of those little quizzes to see if I'm lucid or not. "No, really... you don't understand... I'm like this all the time!"

Anyhow, at that point I decided to drag my sorry ass out of bed and check the calendar and the birth control pills for real because, honestly, some of us simply should not reproduce.

Guess it just goes to show... you're only as old as you think you are... or something like that.

OK, so on that note, I'll leave you with a song by the incomparable Chuck Pyle. Even if this isn't your style of music you should listen... he's hilarious!

The Remember Song, By Chuck Pyle

The Remember Song