Embarrassing numbers
Given that it’s April Fool’s Day, this felt like an appropriate post.
Whether we admit it or not, most of us consider certain numbers to be lucky and unlucky. For example, we might pause before booking air travel on Friday the 13th, or perhaps we always choose ‘23’ on our lotto numbers. In Silent but Deadly: The Underlying Cultural Patterns of Everyday Behaviour, I’ve written about the fact that while conceptions of lucky and unlucky numbers are culturally specific, the numbers that are typically charged – like 3, 7 and 13 – are generally prime numbers. In other words, they are numbers that are not divisible, except by 1, which is itself a prime.
I don’t have a lucky or unlucky number per se, but it has recently struck me that I do have an embarrassing number – a number that makes a frequent appearance in my life not due to mysterious external forces but my own idiocy. This is because all the most publicly embarrassing things that have occurred in my life have happened in twos.
Two is, of course, a prime number – albeit a highly unusual one, because it’s the only even number amongst the primes. Possibly for this reason, many early numerologists were not keen on the number 2, or, for that matter, even numbers more generally. For example, in The Dictionary of Alchemy, the sixteenth-century Paracelsian writer Gerard Dorn is quoted as saying ‘As one can only mate similar things with similar things, and because God has pleasure only in odd numbers, the one unites, with its simplicity, the two into a three, and gives them a soul’.
According to Annemarie Schimmel in her book The Mystery of Numbers, because 2 is the number of contradiction and antithesis – good and bad, dark and light, left and right, male and female, etc. – it is rarely used in magic. As she points out, in the book of Genesis, God doesn’t start characterising things as ‘good’ until the third day (as in the ‘God saw what he had made, and it was good’ narration littered throughout the book). It therefore seems numerologically apt that 2 – the least prime-like and most anti-magical of all the primes – is my embarrassing number.
Slapping someone in the face
I have slapped two people in the face in my life. The first time it happened, I was about eight years old and was at school playing elastics: a popular pastime amongst pre-teen Australian girls in the 1980s. A diligent elastics player in my childhood, I was something of a local elastics champ.1 For this reason, I did not take kindly to people messing with my game.
One day, in the middle of a very intense lunchtime bout of elastics that, rather crucially, I was winning,2 a girl tried to cut in. Without any conscious intent, I upped and slapped her in the face. In retaliation, she immediately dobbed on me to a teacher. This being a state school in Queensland in the early eighties, the standard punishment for bad behaviour in girls was the ruler (boys got the cane), but because it was my first serious infraction, I had to pick up papers at lunchtime for a week instead. Still, nobody ever messed with my elastics game after that.3
The second event happened when I was ten and my siblings and I had gone to a fancy-dress party in which I was dressed up as an ‘old-fashioned girl’. In the mid-1980s in Australia, this basically meant wearing a long floral dress and your hair in ringlets. In a bid for authenticity, my mum had put my hair in rags the night before and it came out very curly.
Well, there was a little boy at the party a couple of years younger than me who spent the whole night saying that I ‘wankers’ on my head.4 I thought I handled the insult with considerable aplomb – until, that is, my hand once again flew out, seemingly of its own volition, and slapped him too across the face. I don’t know who was more shocked, him or me, and I doubt I hit him very hard, but he immediately burst into tears. Thankfully, there were no witnesses, because he spent the rest of the party crying under a car and refusing to come out.
To make matters worse, his mother had just committed suicide – which I learned shortly after my assault, because everybody kept saying ‘What’s wrong with little Joey? Why is he crying and hiding under the car? By the way, did you hear about his mother’s suicide? What a tragedy!’ I pretended I didn’t know what sent him under the car, but I’m pretty sure it was my slap that did it.
Wetting myself in public
I want to start out by making it clear that, like my two assaults, both of these events happened when I was a child. The first time I wet myself, I was five and my parents had gone on their second honeymoon,5 leaving my siblings and I with some friends of the family who lived in a small town in central Queensland. Although we only stayed with them for a week, we were required to go to school – an experience I must have found terrifying because I wet myself in class. I think I was too scared to ask where the toilets were and at a certain point I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
Interestingly, I don’t recall the aftermath of the incident. Did I try and clean myself up? Did I get in trouble? Did it happen late enough in the week that I wasn’t branded ‘the class wee’er’6? To this day, I have no recollection of what happened afterwards. The only thing that has stayed with me was the look of intense disgust I received from a boy sitting near me who witnessed the urine dripping from my desk chair.7
The second event occurred when I was nine and out shopping with my mum and sister. My sister and I were mucking around and I got the giggles. If you have read my post on laughter, you will know that this was a common occurrence as a child, my nickname for a time being ‘Giggling Gertie’. Suffice to say, the expression ‘I laughed so hard I wet myself’ is something I have experienced in a very literal sense.
The circumstances of this particular public urination were much better than my first episode, because I was with my mum and my sister, and I got a new emergency outfit out of it. I actually recall the aftermath of this one: my sister accompanied me to the toilet and while I was changing into my new outfit, we heard a woman doing an immensely long pee, which set us both off again.8 In hindsight, if I’d been slightly more strategic, and my bladder had cooperated, I could possibly have wrangled a second new outfit out of the experience.
Disastrous home perms
When I was eleven years old, my mum won a coupon to a local hairdresser at a school fair. The coupon wasn’t for very much – $10 maybe, which was enough to purchase a partial body wave (i.e., a light perm). Quite possibly, the price of the coupon had something to do with it, but for some reason or other, my mum and I decided that a body wave for my fringe was a good idea. Just the fringe, mind you – the rest of my locks remained untouched.
Because my hair is thin and fine, what perhaps looked like a body wave in someone with thicker hair produced extremely tight curls in my own. The fact that it was done in a random woman’s kitchen may also have had something to do with how badly it turned out. She wasn’t a certified hairdresser is what I’m saying.
While perms normally start to relax within a few months, I had a good six months with that poodle fringe. As the photograph attests, my hair looked, quite frankly, ridiculous – like a schizophrenic mullet that couldn’t decide whether its inspiration was Gene Wilder circa 1975 or Jon Bon Jovi circa 1990.
Despite this experience, I was not yet done with perms. In my late 20s, enough time had passed9 that I decided that I would quite like to try a perm again. As this was during the lengthy period in which I cut my own hair, I decided that I would give myself a home perm. ‘How hard can it be?’, I thought.
The top and left side of my hair were easy enough to put in rollers, but by the time I got to the right side, my arms were getting tired, so I was a bit slapdash – gathering large hunks of hair and shoving them in the roller clips. The back I could not see at all, so I had to prepare it for the perming solution completely by feel. By this stage, I had become bored with the entire process, so I knew it was kind of messy back there, but I figured the general effect would be waves.
Well, what you need to know about perming solution is that it perms your hair exactly the way it has been arranged. If your hair has been tightly curled, it comes out tightly curled. If the hair has been loosely curled, same deal. And if your hair is a tangled mess? Well, that’s exactly what your hair looks like. Permanently. A comb will not dent the bird’s nest. You can brush it (a bad idea with a perm at the best of times), but it will simply look like a frizzy, tangled mess.
Deciding that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I thought, I discovered the next day how wrong I was when a colleague – a gentle older man who was normally the soul of politeness – took one horrified look at me and blurted ‘What on earth have you done to your hair!’ That night, I cut as much of it out as I could, but I looked like I’d been electrocuted for a good three months afterwards. Still, at least I didn’t pay for the privilege of the worst hairdo I’ve ever had. (As I’ve previously stated, while I have paid for plenty of bad haircuts, the worst are the hairdos I’ve given myself).
There are many other episodes in my life that illustrate the curse of twos – most too embarrassing to publicly recount. The worst part is that I can’t even definitively say that 2 is my embarrassing number. What if it’s actually 3, or, god forbid, higher? After all, I do occasionally find myself thinking nostalgically of perms, before I give myself a good talking to. ‘Sure, the early ones didn’t work out’, I think to myself; ‘the next one will be different’.
Of course, I don’t intend to pee myself in public again or slap anyone else in the face, but as a middle-aged woman, I can see that snissing might be in my future, unless I learn how to do a damn Kegel. In the end, I’m forced to conclude that maybe our embarrassing number is something we can only take stock of at the end of our life, because I meet people virtually every day who deserve a good slapping.
I was so committed to the game that I used to practice elastics at home by placing the elastic between two chairs. I can’t stress enough how perilous this activity is, because without any weight to hold the chairs in place (beyond a couple of books plonked on top), they readily tip over. Basically, you have to try and leap out of the elastic or duck for cover as two chairs hurtle towards you at breakneck speed.
Mess with any game I’m winning and you suffer the consequences. That’s how my sister ended up with a scar on her lip: we were playing Scrabble on an iPad and she prematurely tried to end a game that I was winning. We wrestled with it and it accidentally flew into her face and busted her lip.
Quite possibly because nobody actually wanted to play elastics with me after that.
I assume he meant ‘penises’ but experienced some confusion about the appropriate terminology, being all of seven. Yeah, that’s right. I beat up a seven year old.
This wasn’t a landmark wedding anniversary or anything. At the time, ‘second honeymoon’ basically meant a holiday without your kids.
Let’s face it, all classes (at least between grades 1-3) have one.
For the record, I’m pretty sure I later produced the exact same look when a girl peed herself on our grade six camp because she was too scared to leave her tent to urinate during the night.
One of my earliest memories is of entertaining my younger brother and older sister with a reenactment of how my kindergarten teacher went to the toilet. My obsession with bodily functions started young.
From what I can gather, getting perms is a bit like having a baby insofar as after you’ve had one you think ‘never again’. However, after enough time passes, you forget how traumatic the first experience was.