I recent­ly read a blog post where the author talked about how num­bers were alive for her. Each had a gen­der and a rela­tion­ship and were a fam­i­ly and had cer­tain behaviors.

That made me recall how I per­ceived things grow­ing up, and talk­ing with oth­ers I found I was­n’t alone, although each per­son had their own sense of how the num­bers, or let­ters or even col­ors relat­ed to each other.

So I thought I would share mine. I’ll start with numbers:

Each num­ber had a gen­der and was part of a fam­i­ly and and had a rela­tion­ship with anoth­er num­ber (most every­thing else was set­up like this, with vari­a­tions). The only way I can explain it is to just lay it out.

Male Num­bers: 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 30, etc. all the way up
Female num­bers: 2, 4, 8, 9, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20, etc. all the way up.

0 did­n’t real­ly have a gen­der per se, but always felt a lit­tle more “male” to me. Now, here is where it gets tricky to follow:

0 was kind of the par­ent of all num­bers. Try­ing to keep the piece between the two fam­i­lies. (Yes, the two fam­i­lies fought like the Mon­tagues and the Capulets)

Fam­i­ly 1 (the “good” fam­i­ly, they were my favorite): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 were all in the same fam­i­ly (along with their num­bers of 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, etc.)

Fam­i­ly 2 (The “bad” fam­i­ly, not that they were bad, but they weren’t my favorite fam­i­ly): 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, etc. were part of the same fam­i­ly (along with their num­bers of 16, 17, 18, 19, etc.)

In fam­i­ly 1: 1 & 2 were the par­ents, and 3, 4, 5 were the kids
In fam­i­ly 2: 9 & 10 were the par­ents and 6, 7, 8 were the kids

Except that 6, real­ly did­n’t want to be apart of the sec­ond fam­i­ly, it real­ly like to hang out with 4 and 5 and actu­al­ly, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 all got along pret­ty well. But they usu­al­ly pair up, 4 would hang out with 5, 7 would hang out with 8, 3 and 6 would some­times pair up or hang out with 4 & 5. It got to the point though were 6 sort of dis­owned it’s own fam­i­ly and just became sort of neutral.

So that was num­bers. Col­ors were very similar:

Male: Blue, Brown, Black, Pur­ple, Green,
Female: Red, Pink, Yel­low, Orange,

Just like 0, white real­ly did­n’t have a gen­der, but leaned very heav­i­ly towards the male side, except white real­ly was around black a lot, so I nev­er real­ly knew what was going on there…

They real­ly did­n’t have a “Fam­i­ly” order, they just paired up with each other.

Blue + Red dat­ed, Pink + Pur­ple dat­ed, Green + Yel­low dat­ed, Brown + Orange dat­ed, Black+ white were what­ev­er they were….

Brown and Orange were kind of the black sheep of the group and weren’t real­ly includ­ed with oth­ers. Red/blue+pink/Purple would always dou­ble date, and green/yellow would occa­sion­al­ly like to hang out with brown/orange, but not often. Green+yellow were VERY into each other.

I guess, black and white always felt like the grand­par­ents of the group…

And then final­ly letters:

This one was too vast for my child brain to go to far into, but it was like col­ors in that there was a gen­der and cer­tain pairings:

Male Let­ters: A, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, N, R, T, U, W,
Female let­ters; B, K, O, P, Q, S, V, Y
Unknown: X, Z (ALthough X leaned towards the male size and Z leaned towards the female side. Z was always kind of the “Bad twin” of S for me).

Pair­ings: A+B, C+D, E+F, G+H, I+J+K+L, M+N+O+P, Q+R, S+T, U+V and some­times W, X+Y+Z

Okay, so the pair­ings above did­n’t mean they were dat­ing. They just like to hang out. Although, V real­ly did­n’t like U….he was like nerd that no one want­ed to be around, but she kept get­ting paired up with him…she real­ly want­ed to be with T, who was more like the “jock” of the group.

So, that is how my weird brain worked things out. It’s inter­est­ing what our brains came up with to fig­ure every­thing out and keep things straight in our head.

(I won’t go into math, but Addi­tion and Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion were female and sub­trac­tion and divi­sion were male…just sayin.)

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