Yo, fuck numbers. I mean it. We're all terrible people when we focus on the numbers. Can we please just stop with numbers? I'm not reading the rest of The Mirror this week since it'll bother me so much.
What's her GPA? How many shakeouts did that house get? And you said he got how many job offers? How much can you bench? Yo man, where am I at on dues? Remember, students, that your papers must be at least 10 pages long, but not more than 11. On a scale from one to 10, she's a six.
See why I hate numbers? It's our way of quantifying things when we want to look at them in the starkest way possible. But numbers always lie. They always, always lie. We all know people with GPAs above 3.8 who are functional idiots. These people can't even carry a line of conversation and I'm worried that they'll get hit by a car when they cross the street. That's not smart I don't care what the numbers say.
One man's six is another man's 10. Subjectivity, brah.
We're always comparing when we look at the numbers, whether we acknowledge it or not. And in most of these cases, we don't need to be comparing. Every time we talk about GPAs, we're comparing them to those of other people in our class, and that's unnecessary. The only people who care about that are employers and grad schools, and since you're neither Goldman Sachs nor Harvard Law School, you can just take an extra-large serving of shut-the-fuck-up. Whenever somebody talks about how many games of pong they played last night, they're implicitly comparing this number to how many games of pong you played. It's dumb.
I understand the importance of numbers, but whenever we look at things in a non-numeric way, we're so much more honest and we're such better people. Imagine if we didn't rank people on their attractiveness. Just imagine it's easy if you try. Or if professors didn't give us word counts and page minimums and instead gave us assignments that were complex enough that we had to really use pages to wrestle with the issue. Using numbers is such a cop-out.
Shit, even our blitzes have character counts. I read an article in The Mirror a couple years ago about how to write a break-up blitz, and the length was a serious concern. A 1K blitz didn't mean anything, 2K meant you were sincere, 3K meant you were crying and so on. Really? That's how we're judging sincerity, on character counts? What about the quality and honesty of the words?
I do give blitz credit, though, for eliminating one of the barriers to entry that exists in the real world: getting the phone number. If you know somebody's name, you can blitz them. You don't need the secret code that, if entered telephonically, will pass me through to you which means it will be your beautiful-ass number.
THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL is that if this column seems really cranky and rambling, then that's accurate. That's what happens when you have a column due the Sunday after Winter Carnival. Really, Christina? C'mon.
