Dreaming in Logarithms

“So when you look at me,” She asks on our third date “you see logarithms?”
The answer would probably bore her to death, and she expects a one word answer. I want to answer her in numbers. I want to go back and trail every movement that led us up to sitting here, numerically, like breadcrumbs in binary. That's what's so great about numbers, they interact only on a level of pure certainty. There's never anything unexpected with numbers, nothing extraordinary or new. Nobody has to buy flowers or candy or spritz cologne on their jacket sleeve. There's no planning out what they'll talk about at the restaurant, or who makes their first move. When a 7 meets an 8 they know instinctively what's going to happen. They see each other and bam, they become 15. They're happy with that. Spontaneity has it's downfalls.
I sit trying to put the equation 32x+b into language while she spends what will be our last moments together thinking about her fish in coconut sauce, the #71. This is to be expected. Of course, what I can't seem to tell her is that everything is to be expected. When the check comes she'll offer to pay the tip. She'll miscalculate by over a dollar. I'll look at the waiter and shrug, and in about 20 minutes, he'll understand.
And this has been going on for over 23 years. 23.4 to be precise. It started with 9s. I sat under the monkey bars for hours, admiring them, running my fingertips over freshly pencil pressed 9s. I searched for perfect 9s, the way they occur in type, pirouetted on empty floors, tail curled into themselves. There's nothing that matches the simple beauty of the 9 table. Everything in a 9 table says 9. 9x9 is 81. 8+1=9. 9s just know that they're 9s. They stand proud in a number line, the last of the single digits, overseeing everything before them, obstinate and final, like fancy parentheses.
I tried to stay 9 for as long as I could. The night of my 10th birthday I prayed with all my might
not to turn 10. I wouldn't touch my birthday cake, I wouldn't wear the hat. I didn't open my very obvious bicycle or the slightly less obvious striped turtleneck sweater. I buried myself in my room and took all the batteries out of all the clocks. When my parents finally gave up and went to sleep I snuck downstairs in my footie and carefully lit 9 candles. “Please,” I asked God, “stop tomorrow.”
10. I hated 10. I hated how 10 got to represent perfection with oversimplification. 10s made for easy calculations with a whole bunch of nothing at the end of them. Not impressive. Especially to somebody who had very recently been 9.
According to most child psychologists, 6 is the age where you begin to recognize patterns, but 10 is the age where you learn to apply them. This is why the IQ test psychologists administer to dyslexic kids and geniuses changes dramatically once they hit 11. The patterns all change, the test becomes 5 times harder, but the final scores stay roughly the same.
What most people don't understand is that once you start to see patterns, you immediately begin to ignore them. There's a whole part of your brain that has the sole function of prediction. It detects normalcy and executes it on site. If something isn't surprising or new, your brain won't process it. It's seen it all before. And the only reason it's there is to keep our brains safe. And being as the average person sees 2904 images every day and remembers only 4, ignoring the expected is the only thing stopping us from going insane.
And if you exercise that muscle, you can see forever. You can anticipate patterns using patterns, and see new patterns coming from miles away. You can eliminate the element of surprise, until you're just forecasting in formulas. And then time becomes irrelevant, it's really more of a waiting game. And everything is a little more boring because you already know everything that's going to happen. And then one day you go to sleep and find yourself dreaming in logarithms.
In fact, the last time I saw something new was the end of math. My graduate level math seminar in the last year of undergraduate. The last seminar in the pamphlet. The instructor was the chair of the program and had math awards that other math people had given her, all basically saying that she was the best math person of all of them. The plaques decorated her mantle like a jury in hung agreement.
She slid her chalk across the board underlining the last formula on the board. “Well, that's math folks” she said, putting her chalk down. “I hope all of you enjoyed it.”
“There are two weeks left of the semester,” I whispered to myself. “It's too late to learn Latin.”
So Math ruined everything. I can tell you how a book ends when I read the first line. I can walk into a drugstore and tell you how much they earned last year. I can call an earthquake from a butterfly landing on a patch of grass. I can tell you when you were born to the nearest hour and dress for the weather next April.
You can kill at parties with a trick like that. A couple of guessed drink orders, a friendly bet on when the waiter will drop his tray and, poof, you're a star. Kissed napkins and matchbooks overflowing out your pocket. And then, well, you know what happens after that. And that's what takes all the fun out of it.
The biggest problem with a trick like that is not using it. It's waking up naïve every day and pretending that there's something you don't know. Someday soon I promise myself I'm going to trick reality. Just out and win. Predict one level further, one level faster than reality can go. I'll charge past the known and into the lingering. I'll do it when nobody expects it, when even I don't see it coming.
“Stay,” I tell her. “Stay and have coffee and let's do the craziest thing you can think of, something you...”
“I can't, I have to...”
“No, please, I already know what you're going to say. Just instead, do the opposite, or the opposite of the opposite, do anything unexpected. Throw a fork at the waiter, or better yet don't...”
“Listen,” she says, like it's me that doesn't get it, “it's not that I don't like you.”
“But I already know that it is. But if you could hear me out, you could, you would if you...”
“Stop.” I give her a second and try to clear every thought from my head.
“I know I sound crazy, but please, have some faith.”
“I understand what you're trying to do but I'm just not...”
“You're not a guinea pig.”
“Precisely.”
I already know I can't argue with that. As expected, these are our last moments together.
“Have faith.” I whisper. She can hear it, she's just pretending not to. Our lazy waiter drops off the check. 120 dollars for bad fish and over cooked steak.
“Thank you for dinner” she says, and leaves a 20.