Counting on You

(back by demand)

**

I get up at 6:42am. The alarm radio blaring, the announcer recounts the top 5 news stories of the day. I take a 12 minute shower and think of you once while I wash my hair but urge the thought down the drain with the suds. I spend 10 minutes carefully applying makeup no one will take notice of and another 10 combing my hair the same way I comb my hair every morning. I give 2 minutes’ thought to my wardrobe, not caring particularly because it’s likely I won’t leave my office for the duration of the day. I allow 1 minute 30 seconds to brush my teeth before leaving the house.

I take 547 steps to the grocery store to buy lunch for the day and another 287 to the coffee shop, where I spend $2.76 on 1 extra large dark roast coffee with room for cream which I pay for with a crisp $5 bill. I think of you 4 times between the front door and the coffee shop, once as I count my change and once more when I take that first sip of coffee. I use the remaining $2.24 to pay for the fare to ride the 135 the 12 blocks to work. I get off the bus and walk 627 steps to the door of my office.

I use the third key on my keychain to unlock the door. Inside, I punch in my 4 digit security code to turn off the alarm. Mine is the third office on the right. You will not visit my office today. I section the 7 and ½ hours of my work day into partitions of 3, 2-hour sections and 1, 1 and ½ hour section and bill any 4 of my 14 clients for each of those windows of time appropriately. I spend ½ -hour outside in the sun over lunch after carefully applying an SPF 15 sunscreen and putting on my pair of chipped, white sunglasses. Outside, I eat 1 small salad, ensuring I chew each bite 30 times. I take 4 bathroom breaks – 2 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon – a consequence of the 1 extra large coffee. I accept 27 phone calls and 17 emails – a slow day. I walk home after work. A good 2,742 steps to my front door.

I smoke 1 cigarette after work on my balcony and contemplate opening 1 bottle of wine but instead drink 1 glass of water while preparing a meal for 1. I eat in front of the television, allowing myself 1 hour of indulgent programming. I turn off the television, turn on my favourite CD – 67 minutes of music – and read 98 pages of my book, stopping twice to pet the cat 3 times under each ear.

I walk to the window 4 times and see the same 3 people standing in the parking lot each time. You are not 1 of those 3 people. My phone rings 3 times and each time I ignore it. You are not ringing me any 1 of those 3 times. I wash my 1 plate, 1 fork and 2 pots and spend 11 minutes drying the 4 dishes and putting them away in their 3 respective cupboards.

I check my Facebook, myspace, email, blog and spend 27 minutes thinking of 13 ways to waste time so I don’t pick up the phone and dial your 7 digits. I boil water on the back burner of the stove to make 1 cup of tea. I sip it, staring at my pack of smokes, contemplating having a second. I don’t. Instead, I take 8 minutes to wash the makeup off my face and brush my teeth and turn to bed. I arrange my 4 pillows and choose 1 book from the pile of 11 next to my bed. I turn off the overhead light and snap on the bedside lamp. I read for 22 minutes, until I fall asleep with the lights still on, still counting on you to think of me.

xoxo

M.L. H’art

642: The Balance Number. Describes how you react to life’s challenges. It motivates us to handle life’s challenges at best. Reveals strengths in emotional or turbulent times.

5: Five is conjectured to be the only odd untouchable number (a positive integer that cannot be expressed as the sum of all the proper divisors of any positive integer).

12: The word “twelve” is a native English word that presumably arises from the Germanic compound twa-lif (“two-leave”).

10: Ten is symbolic for sexual intercourse between a male and a female.

2: The Life Path 2 suggests that you entered this plane with a spiritual quality in your makeup allowing you to be one of the peacemakers in society. Your strengths come from an ability to listen and absorb. You are a fixer, a mediator, and a very diplomatic type of person using persuasive skills rather than forcefulness to make your way in the world.

130: In Chinese Numerology, 0 is a number that’s discarded. 1: Practical. This includes manual labor, athletic ability and physical coordination, and plain old common sense. 3: Thought. Intellectual capacity, creative ability, and the capacity to carry out ideas.

547: In Leet Orthography, representative of the word “Sat,” or abbreviation for “Saturday,” named for the Roman god Saturnus. Medieval and Renaissance scholars associated Saturn with one of the four humors of ancient medicine, melancholy. Physicians, scholars, philosophers and scientists, which includes writers and musicians, seem to have a strong Saturn placement which tends to lean such natives toward melancholy.

287: The number 7 occurs 287 times in the Old Testament. Seven deals with the esoteric, scholarly aspects of magic and is representative of scholarly activities, mystery and active esoteric knowledge. Seven represents activation of imagination, and manifestation resulting in our lives through the use of conscious thought and awareness. Ruled by Saturn, Seven represents impractical dreaming.

276: 2+7+6=15. The 15^th card of the Tarot deck is representative of The Devil. Perhaps the most misunderstood card of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really “Satan” at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. With Capricorn as its ruling sign, this is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild – or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement.

1: In Indian Numerology, the psychic number reveals the way you look at yourself, who you really want to be and what defines your basic character. It represents your basic predispositions and talents that lead you to interact daily in a particular way. 1 as a psychic number represents a disposition that is sunny, energetic, radiant, confident, proud, self centered, goal oriented, socially active, leader vs. follower, self actualized, authoritative. 1 can also be cruel in intensity, arrogant and ready to rule, yet on account of the regal qualities also a protector and provider. Known for lavish gifts, boldness, with good endurance.

4: The symbolic meanings of the number four are linked to those of the cross and the square. Almost from prehistoric times, the number four was employed to signify what was solid, what could be touched and felt; an outstanding symbol of wholeness and universality, a symbol which drew all to itself.

224: 2+2+4=8. The Dharma chakra, a Buddhist symbol, has eight spokes. The Buddha’s principal teaching — the Four Noble Truths — ramifies as the Noble Eightfold Path. In Mahayana Buddhism, the branches of the Eightfold Path are embodied by the Eight Great Bodhisattvas (Manjushri, Vajrapani, Avalokiteshvara, Maitreya, Kshitigarbha, Nivaranavishkambhi, Akashagarbha, and Samantabhadra). These are later (controversially) associated with the Eight Consciousnesses according to the Yogachara school of thought: consciousness in the five senses, thought-consciousness, self-consciousness and unconsciousness-’consciousness’ (alaya-vijñana). The ‘irreversible’ state of enlightenment is the Eight Ground or bhūmi.

135: In astrology, when two planets are 135 degrees apart, they are in an astrological aspect called a sesquiquadrate and is usually interpreted as providing an influence of irritation or agitation on the planets involved.

12: In antiquity, even before Christianity, 12 was a perfect, complete number.

627: “Reason Number 627 to See the World – to see how the world sees you. I am still walking around in my same body, with my same life, and the same personality, but out there is a whole new set of eyes, a new batch of teachers. Every moment, every nod of a passing stranger gives me a slightly new perspective of myself, of the other people who live on this planet, and how I might live on it differently with them. Tiny little lessons, each step, each glance is a moment to see something new.”

3: Feri Tradition (sometimes spelled Faery, Faerie) postulates the existence of three separate yet interdependent souls as a part of the natural psychic structure of the human being. Although a multitude of different names are used to describe them, they are sometimes called the fetch, the talker, and the Godself. The talker is that part of humans which is self-aware and deals with language, rational thought, and the gathering and dissemination of knowledge. It is the first line of communication with others. The fetch is emotional, pre-verbal, primal, and childlike. It is concerned with generating and storing energy, with the maintenance of the physical body, with housing memories, and is the first to feel deep emotions, such as fear or falling in love. Finally, the Godself is the eternal part of humans, a direct connection to the Goddess. It is said that the talker cannot speak directly to the Godself as they do not speak the same language; therefore, Feris approach the Godself by way of the fetch using symbolism (art, poetry, music, visualizations, etc.). A central practice of Feri concerns bringing these souls into alignment so they may communicate freely, granting the practitioner a deeper awareness of their own personal Godself and the Goddess.

½: one of a pair, as a partner

14: The number of lines in a sonnet, meaning “little song.” Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14 contains one dominant image, that of a young man’s eyes as stars, from which the poet attains his knowledge.

15: In tennis, the number 15 represents the first point gained in a game.

30: In ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ the French existentialist Albert Camus comments that the age of thirty is a crucial period in the life of a man, for at that age he gains a new awareness of the meaning of time.

27: The smallest positive integer requiring four syllables to name in English, though it can be unambiguously defined in just two: “three cubed.”

17: There is an unproved conjecture that 17 is the value most likely to be picked as a “random” number.

67: considered a “lucky prime” or a lucky number that is also a natural prime in mathematics. In a sense, such numbers are doubly “lucky” because they’ve survived two different sieves. It’s known that there are infinitely many primes and it’s known that there are infinitely many lucky numbers, but it’s not known if there are infinitely many lucky primes.

11: Number Eleven possesses the qualities of intuition, patience, honesty, sensitivity, and spirituality, and is idealistic. Numerologists believe that events linked to the time 11:11 appear more often than chance or coincidence. This belief is related to the concept of synchronicity, the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related.

13: The number of Norse gods (there were 12) at a banquet that was crashed by the evil spirit Loki (making 13) who killed Baldr with an arrow/spear made out of mistletoe using Hodr, thus marking the beginning of Ragnarok, the final battle waged between the Æsir, led by Odin, and the various forces of the giants or Jötnar, including Loki, followed by the destruction of the world and its subsequent rebirth.

22: The number 22 is significant in many systems of numerology, often called the Master Builder or Spiritual Master in Form. This ‘master number’ includes all the attributes of the number 2, twice over, and also those of the 4. People who are 22s are said to find themselves feeling as if they live in two worlds, one which is overwhelmed by the mundane, and the other by the fantastic.