Usually I just kind of shrug and smile, because it's a hard sort of thing to explain. Sometimes I give them a Zen-like quip, like "if you aren't lost, you can never be found," or "you can lead a horse to a tidal pool, but you can't make it deep-fry the crabs." If they're the sort of person who enjoys being abused, I'll tell them something like "more satisfying than someone like you could ever imagine," which is usually true.

I realized today, while I was getting gas, that the best way to answer that question was to provide an illustrative story. It's a long story with a short point, and it isn't very important at all in the big scheme of things, but that's sometimes the way things go. So.

This Is What It Is Like To Be Me

This morning I realized that I needed to put gas in the car. I glanced into my checkbook and saw that I had plenty of money... $201.11 to be exact. Not a fortune by any stretch, but more than enough to get me to payday, and certainly enough to fill up the car.

I don't like to carry my checkbook around with me. There is no particular reason for this. I just find it a bit of an inconvenience. So, before I left the house, I made a note in my checkbook that on 3/12/03 I spent $11.11 (ATM Debit) on gas. My intention was to stop at the gas station on the way to work, and pump eleven dollars and eleven cents worth of gas, charging it to my checkcard.

Why $11.11? Blaise knows. It's so that my new checking balance would end in a nice, even number, divisible by ten. Again, there was no real point to it, but it certainly feels comfortable.

So, I drove to the gas station, deliberately leaving my checkbook behind. As long as I was able to pump exactly $11.11, the figures I had entered in would be correct. As everyone with a car knows, getting the pump to stop on the penny can be a little tricky, but it's hardly brain surgery. After spending nearly half my life training in martial arts, my hands are steady enough when they need to be.

I pumped the gas. At $1.55 a gallon, the numbers spin past almost too fast to see, but if you lighten up on the pump and slow the gas to a trickle, you can watch the meter tick off pennies at a time instead of nickels and dimes. That's what I planned to do when the pump reached nine or ten dollars: slow it down a bit, and then a bit more, and watch the meter slowly turn over from $11.09 to $11.10 to $11.11.

Did any of the rest of you notice what an absolutely gorgeous day it was today? Bright and warm and breezy, with that fresh feel that the air gets sometime shortly after February slips away? I noticed it while I was standing there at the gas pump, my hand clamped tight on the handle of the nozzle, the gas pouring into my car just lickety-split, and the numbers on the pump whirling away. Beautiful, stunningly lovely day.

As soon as I realized that I had been woolgathering, I let go of the pump, knowing that chances were about 100 to 1 that I had overpumped, and was going to need to remember to change my checkbook balance when I returned home in the evening. It wasn't a big deal by any stretch, and I wasn't inclined to fret over it... certainly not, when the day was so bright and beautiful.

You already know how this story ends, of course. When I released my grip and flicked my eyes up to the meter on the pump, it was just turning over to eleven dollars and eleven cents.