The Odds: Fifty-Six (Part IV)

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Do you think it’s possible that the only reason I’m starting this sentence with a question is because, in order to set up formatting, I copy-pasted each installment beginning with ‘Have you ever wanted to write a story?’ and when I tried to highlight and overwrite it, I missed the question mark? No, it’s not.

Honestly, it would be rather difficult for me to remember exactly how I came to the conclusion that Fifty-Six should be my fourth number. The first three numbers in my list were a part of me. They were inherent to my understanding of how writing, and the world, works. It’s also a bit of a chicken or the egg thing with whether I thought to come up with numbers after watching LOST, or if I focused a lot on the LOST numbers because I had already found significance in my own. But as the old tangent goes, there’s a logical answer to the chicken or the egg “dilemma”. The problem here is that a chicken cannot be born but from an egg, and an egg cannot exist without being laid by a chicken. And so they seem equally likely and unlikely as each other, because one is wholly dependent on the other. But...ignoring all evolutionary concepts (read: reality) on the matter, one has an advantage over the other. Are you ready to have your minds blown? A chicken can live perfectly happily without an egg, but an egg cannot survive without a chicken to protect it from danger, following its creation. Somebody clean up this graymatter! You’re welcome!

Back to what I was saying, when you add up all the LOST numbers of 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42, you end up with the number 108. When I started adding up my three preexisting numbers, I somehow realized how easy it would be for them to reach 216; twice 108, of course. Without any more calculations, I determined that, in order to reach that sum, my last two numbers would have to be around 50 and 80. I tried a few different combinations. 55 + 84? I didn’t want Fifty-Five to intrude on Eleven’s purpose of being palindromic. It would have been an interesting choice since it’s a Fibonacci number, but since my first three preclude me from also using 89, it would have seemed like a waste anyway. 52 + 87? I didn’t want there to be a connection to playing cards, and I didn’t like my birth year being in there, because it’s too obvious. I tried a few more, and finally settled on Fifty-Six and Eighty-Three. Now this seems very inorganic and insincere, but the process itself is what makes these numbers relevant. Yes, by the time I got to them, I had already been looking to complete my collection, but that’s what makes it so cool. The effort I put into finding Fifty-Six in the first place is what imbued it with its power.

Other people have used Fifty-Six for their own reasons, all of which I read about just now, and did not consider when first coming up with it. The most fascinating one is that Shirley Temple’s mother always ensured that she wore 56 curls as a child. I can’t find any information as to why her mother chose that number (or why that number chose her mother), but it seemed to have worked. She was the archetype of the cute child; one that casting directors and modeling agents seem to look for even today. While the ideal “beautiful person” has changed over time, if you think about it, the most adorable children in advertising are determined by how closely they resemble her. I suppose the curls themselves have nothing to do with that, but still. Hey, I’m just spitballing here. Well...I mean, I’m not. That’s gross.

Speaking of numbers, when I started writing for my website, I went through some growing pains to try and figure out how long each installment would be. The early ones are all over the place, and show no level of continuity, in that regard. But then the microstories started being between 200 to 300 words each. I think. I would have to go back and look, but I’m pretty sure they were on the short side, just reaching into my memory. The weekend stories—which I first referred to as flash fiction, and now call mezzofiction (in order to maintain that continuity)—were shaping up to be longer. In fact, they were about five times as long, which meant that five microstories were equal to one longer story. But that’s dumb, because there are two days in a weekend. I continued to work on creating a site that you could count on. Literally. Instead of posting nanofiction stories as they popped into my head, I starting writing them out in a spreadsheet, with the intention of posting them every three hours, a pattern which is broken only by my afternoon story post, and my evening photo. Speaking of which, sorry about the lack of photos. They take more effort than you would think, I’ve run out of “things” in my house, and I don’t get out much. As my methods progressed, I came up with interrelated microstory series that would last for weeks, and were connected in some way, rather than just whatever I could come up with at the time. Lastly, I decided to decide on story arcs for The Advancement of Mateo Matic that would last a year/volume each, and I planned for future Saturday mezzofiction so that I would never again be caught with my pants down, like I was with the continuation of Mr. Muxley Meets Mediocrity. And that’s funny, because my pants fell down when I realized I had no idea what this very story you’re reading now would be about.

Things were falling into place as they should have. Microstory length increased to about 300 to 500, with the mode being rather close to the median. Mezzofiction story length still hovers around 1250 words, but I’m finding I need a little more for my more recent installments of The Advancement of Mateo Matic. It’s easy to go over my mark, but it’s hard for me to be under. I always feel like I’m cheating you out of something, or that I’m missing something and it’s incomplete. But I need to get over that. I don’t encounter Fifty-Six nearly as much as the other four. And that’s okay, because magic numbers aren’t real. When an installment is done, it needs to be done. And right now, I’m only at 1119 words, but it’s done. That is at least more than I thought there would be.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I only started posting my images alongside my stories because I noticed an uptick in clicks when I did so. Most of my traffic, I believe, comes from Facebook. And as you’re going through your feed, if you don’t see a picture, you don’t see it. It might as well not exist. I’m a word guy, I like words. Honestly, you guys are frustratingly simplistic, and I struggle to come up with images that match my words. I’ve even altered my stories in order to match with a picture I already have. Which is ridiculous, and not how writing should be done! Grrr! Anyway, here’s a picture of some penguins, because nothing else works with this story. This is what you have reduced me to. Are you happy? 1256 words. Hmm...

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Microstory 205: New Measurements

I realize that I’ve mentioned a few what you must believe to be measurements, but are not completely sure. You see, my stories take place in a universe where such things are part of common knowledge, and very few people can act as “audience proxies”. I try to go over things, but at the same time, I want to organically bring them up, rather than just spell them out. If you were telling a story about Barack Obama, you wouldn’t first explain that Obama was the President of the United States of America between the common era years of 2009 to 2016. Everybody knows that...mostly. But since the secondary purpose of this site is to give you an introduction to my new world, I’m just going to go at it; in this case, giving you highlights of a fictional (or is it?) measurement system. The smallest positive unit of measurement is the yoem. It is equal to 2.442 millimeters. Multiply that by 10 and you get the deam which is 2.442 centimeters. Multiply by 10 and we have a sheam: 24.42 centimeters. Get the picture? Continue to multiply by 10 for a geara: 2.670603674541 yards (8.011811023623 feet); demra: 26.70603674541 yards (80.11811023623 feet); shemra: 267.0603674541 yards (801.1811023623 feet); and nayko: 2.442 kilometers (8,011.811023623 feet). That last one is what my characters use in place of a mile, and naykos per hour are informally referred to as neels. Units of mass follow a similar linguistic and mathematical structure starting with the yoemtra: 2.442 grams; deamtra: 0.86139 ounces; sheamtra (sheels): 0.538369 pounds; gearatra: 5.38369 pounds; demratra: 53.8369 pounds; shemratra: 538.369 pounds; and naykotra: 2.691845 tons (5,383.69 pounds). So the next time someone asks you how tall you are and how much you weigh, after punching them in the face for being rude, you can say something like 7 sheaman and 24 gearatran. Oh yeah, by the way, if you want to pluralize something, you add -an to the end (or just -n if the singular ends in a vowel). Did you not already know that?

Microstory 155: Quang Phan

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Like Freeman and Gus, Quang Phan grew up not being aware that he had a special ability, instead assuming that what he could do was a trait shared by all. He had an innate sense of measurement, including length, area, volume, weight, mass, density, temperature, pressure, viscosity, time, speed, energy, force, flow, frequency, direction, and angle. At first, he could just tell the difference between two measurements, for instance knowing when an object was heavier than another. But the more educated he became regarding the human constructs of measurement, the more dynamic his ability became. Instead of only understanding comparisons, he began to see relevant numbers. His eyes adjusted to need, and he was eventually able to literally see numbers and lines superimposed onto the objects they were associated with. He could read in the space between a building and a vehicle, that they were separated by about one geara. If he so chose, he could focus on that measurement, and become more accurate, so that he would know that they were separated by 1.489 geara. His ability increased, and by the time he was an adult, he could even read the amount of space on a digital storage device, despite there being no real-world analog to such a thing. He was fairly young when he left Vietnam to join Bellevue, so he spent a number of years being further educated by the likes of Claude, Mandy, Laurence, Drummond, and Ceres. After he had completed his schooling, he put his ability to use in the construction department as they expanded into a full-fledged city, able to direct progress with no aid of blueprints. Many years later, he and several others embarked on the final journey in search of the missing children. Not only was his expertise valuable for the mission, but he was present for  his friends’ disappearance, and had a personal interest in finding them.