I've loved numbers ever since I was a small child. The count on Sesame Street was my homeboy. Numbers and math have always spoken to obsessive compulsive in me. It actually started in the womb. It was like one of those shows where they ask the horse what two and two are, and he stomps the ground four times. Mom would say, "Fetal Billy, what is three plus two?" Then I would proceed to kick against the wall of her uterus five times. In all fairness, she had tried the act sixteen years before with my brother Rick, the accountant. It didn't work. She would ask him the same question, and the only result was a muffled, conspiratorial voice from somewhere up under her skirt saying, "What do you want it to be?"

Math was always one of my favorite subjects in school. In fact, even now when I hear the word pie, the first visual in my head is the little Stonehenge looking symbol for pi. I once spent an hour and a half bus ride to a high school sporting event seeing how many places I could divide pi out to. I am proud to say that even today, I still have it memorized to seven places.

Even after school, math tended to be a ceaseless source of amusement to me. To while away the time on long automobile trips, I would continually estimate time of arrival using the classic "rate times time equals distance" formula. I could contentedly do this for up to five hours or more, revising estimates for stop times and other variables. It drove my first wife absolutely crazy, which was an exciting fringe benefit. I believe the straw that broke the camel's back was when I tried to divine the flow rate of mother's milk from her breasts and the capacity of our daughter's stomach to determine travel time lost due to nursing.

That is one of the things that I love about numbers. They are absolute, but at the same time, variable. In other words, it is obvious that one is a single unit of something. However, one could maintain, as Valtrex does, that one, when inserted to the phrase "one in five" is the number of adults in the United States with genital herpes. Sometimes, I'm not at all sure that I take assertions such as these as truths. I had a heck of a time at church figuring out which two of the ten people I shook hands with had herpes. Kind of makes you want to wash your hands a little more often. Is it really one in five of every people you meet? Is it really equally dispersed, or are there a bunch of heathens in Las Vegas or Los Angeles throwing off the curve?

It is more than likely true that numbers have as many different values as there are people. For instance, the number nineteen to me represents my neck size in inches. The same number to Paris Hilton will more likely call to mind her waist size in inches, number of sexual partners in the last month, the number of times she uses the word "hot" in an interview, or her I.Q.

Indeed, the way he looks at numbers can tell a person a lot about himself, whether it's good or bad. For instance, when I was in high school, a guy being able to bench press his weight was a good thing. As I get older, wearing my age or higher in my pants waist size is a bad thing. Speaking of weight, if pounds were Spartans mine could effectively hold off the Persians for up to a week and a half. Then again, the unit of measure is always an important variable in the way one's personal statistics come across. Because the metric system is Greek to me, I always find my weight a less damning statistic when expressed in kilos rather than pounds because the number just seems much smaller to me. Conversely, I prefer to express other personal measurements in centimeters as they sound much larger than the relative measure in inches. But I digress.

Well, I could go on and on about numbers all day long because you, my dear readers are number one to me. However, I need to go now; number two calls.