I'm An Expert In Numberology!

Yes, I know that it's actually numerology. I was referencing Boondock Saints. Mad props if you caught it. If you didn't, your mean for assuming that I'm dumb. That hurts.

Okay, so anyway, I watched a movie called "The Number 23". It's a little bit of a strange movie, a psychological thriller if you will. Overall, the movie was... alright. I'm not a fan of Jim Carrey (who played the lead) but I'll allow that he did a decent job in this film. The thing that got to me, though, was the ridiculousness of part of the premise.

Basically, the main character things the number 23 is haunting him. He sees it everywhere he goes and everything in his life can be turned into 23 somehow or another and he eventually goes crazy and becomes a murderer. The movie plot much more involved and a little twisted up, so I'm not going to try to explain it, but the idea of everything turning to 23 just struck me as silly. Not because it's impossible but because it's so utterly normal.

My friends and I started looking around the room and picking random objects and turning them into 23. It's really not hard. You just have to twist the numbers around until they do what you want. You can do it with pretty much anything. The thought that that'd be enough to drive someone crazy was a little far out there. Then again, some people are crazy.

I started thinking about numbers people notice, though, and I was reminded of one of my friends from Wheaton. His name was Joe Michalka, but we mostly called him Joe Pi, because he loved the number pi.

For you non-math-wizards, pi is the ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference. It's really long, because the calculations to get it don't terminate. In simple people speak, that means it's a number that's infinity digits long. Mathematicians have calculated the first zillion digits or so, though, which is all anybody needs. Important part: the first three digits of pi are 3.14, cause most of the time you don't need to be much more exact than that.

Anywho, Joe would pick out 3.14 from random places all over his life. The number of a hymn, the length of time it would take us to finish a game of Super Smash Brothers, you name it. It's interesting to see how often it pops up when you're looking for it. Instead of going crazy, though, Joe once explained that he thinks of it as seeing little reminders of God's presence around him. I'm not sure exactly how he phrased it, but it seems much better than going crazy and becoming a murderer.

So if you keep seeing a number all around you, I'd suggest handle it using the Joe method, not the Jim method.