O frabjous day of twenty-two-ness: batshit-bananas numerology, and baseball spring fever

“O, frabjous day! Calloo, callay!” (Carroll, Jabberwocky.)

Computer is fixed!, day off with the littl’un!, Spring Training has begun! and it’s my favorite day of the year — 2/22! Historically, this is my lucky day. I’ve always liked this date best out of the rest of the calendar. Twenty-two is my lucky number from very, very far back, followed closely by two itself (twenty-two trumps just-two because what’s better than one two? two twos. three twos, as in two-hundred-twenty-two, are okay but still inferior because they are three and not two in number. do not attempt to unravel this logic) and this was also the birthday of my first friend, Alex; feeding ducks with her by the little pond at Noble Library in San Jose is one of my first memories of laughing just from being happy. I wish it stopped there with the whyness of twenty-two-ness, but I get kind of …. into numbers.

See also: my lucky time (10:22 PM, or 22:22); the pages of Treasure Island and Wuthering Heights on which I hide money (222 and 22, respectively); the exact uniform number of Robinson Cano and less auspiciously Roger Clemens.

Julie Newmar: “Batterrrr uuup!”

Ask me someday about my theory that he is two people, one the familiar Texan do-gooder and all-around nice fellow Roger Clemens we came to love, and the other an evil, lying, cauldron of seething rage named Rogero Clemenzetti. A wicked and long-dormant personality who will stop at nothing to satisfy his creepy id-like aims, Clemenzetti emerged after a rat bit Clemens in an otherwise empty subway car between Long Island and New York, and he has never been successfully suppressed ever since — it is a very sad case of Jekyll-and-Hyde and I’m surprised no one else has caught it.

Picture from Star Trek Movie Night at the Giants’ AT&T park via Trek Movie.com, taken 4/27/09. I did not attend, as I was at the zoo with my kidlet for her 5th birthday — but we went to the movie later that week and we both cried at the beginning; we are diehard fans of Treks TOSand TNG (not so much the soapier others), but we looooved the reboot and did not find it sacrilegious at all (hot boys don’t hurt neither, and it’s about time we got some girl fan service up in this piece!).

In other thrilling baseball connections, 22 is half of the jersey number of Hank Aaron and Reggie Jackson (4’s and 44 are goodish numbers because of their relationship with 2, being both the square of it and divisible by it, but 8, despite being not just a multiple but its cube is not as good, I feel less comfortable around 8 because it’s just getting too far from 2); 20 (an also-very-very good number because 2 + 0 = 2) less than the number of one of the sport’s greatest heroes, Jackie Robinson (being 42 which is a super-very good number because of DA); and, best of all, it is 20 + 2, 20 being Jorge Posada’s jersey number, though he wore 22 for a few weeks in 1997, before the re-acquisition of Mike Stanley (meh), when Posada switched to 20 so Stanley could once more wear 22 (again, MEH).

Gwen Stefani: “Batterrrr uuup!”

As you can see, 22 is the best number there is, 20 and 2 being close seconds, and therefore 2/22 is the best day of the year. Period. Also: baseball.

Baseball players always have bubble butts. I do not know what repetitive motion it is they do that gives them woman hips, but they’ve all got ’em, except for lanky pitchers, who just have bad knees.

Sorry for the long and pointless diversion but if nothing else, I hope this has proven to you the depths of my numerical mania, and the next time I scoff at the zodiac, feel free to remind me that I have insanely detailed schools of superstition of my own and would do well not to throw stones.

via Michael Leget on the photobucket.

If you think all that was bad, you should talk to my husband, who is medicated for obsessive compulsive disorder, some time about the Importance of Doing Things By Three. He will make a believer of you or die trying. It’s a passion that probably frightened away other, wiser girls, but actually endeared him to me.

Sunshine on the vine, or, pretty girls make caves

Raspberries are my favorite fruit, possibly even my favorite food. They make me think of summer in my grandfather’s garden (my dad’s dad, Mike, never to be confused with the other one, who I call my mother’s father, period).

Don’t get the idea that was some recurrent thing I did in summers or in anytime, spend time with my grandfather in his garden; even though it is a special secret and sacred place in my memory, in actuality it was a place where I scarcely ever got to go, because my parents are vagabonds because they had this awesomely secure childhood in a small town and this strong sense of identity, so they can ramble from place to place, whereas I crave that exact type of feeling of belonging and having roots, and have never had it. I come closest where I live now, where I have chosen to carve out a little cave for myself, but I cannot ignore the fact that I am basically a person without a place I’m “From” when someone asks. If I have a memory of riding my trike, I have to stop and ask myself like, which mobile home park was that? Was that when we lived in the first or the second place in San Jose? There is no permanence, there is no consistency, until I was in my early teens and we moved to the Central Valley.

I get a shade of what it must be like for my parents, what it must be like to have an identity associated with a place, when we do on rare occasions visit family in Priest River. It’s weird to walk through a cemetery and realize how many dead people you’re related to because both sides of your family are from the same remote logging town in Northern Idaho. Honestly? I always buy newspapers from there and even bought a town anniversary book that had a history of it; I love it there. I suppose if I had grown up there I would have hated it, at least, that’s what I try to tell myself. Anyway, today my father sensed I was sick and maybe emotionally a little under the weather as well (awww, love that understatement), and he brought me some raspberries from the Raley’s.

I guess “home” is what you make it be; maybe it is more about people than about places or sights. Either way. Raspberries! Feeling that sparkly pop on my tongue is the best thing to happen to me in several days.