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2006-11-06 - 12:05 a.m. When I was young (like kindergarten and first grade), the hottest trend in education was the Letter People. All the letters had personalities. The vowels were all female and the consonants male. This has stuck with me to this day. I don't know if others think of letters this way or if I'm just warped by a fad in elementary educational theory. Doesn't matter. The weird thing is that they had nothing like this that I remember for numbers. Numbers were just numbers. They were simply a way of tallying how many apples or pennies or dots or whatever. There was no athropomorphing done to the digits. Except in my mind. I guess I was a natural born story teller. Have to remember something? Give it a story and you'll never forget. 1 was a lonely number. No, to the best of my knowledge, I'd never heard of Three Dog Night in the first grade. I may have, but I don't think that influenced things. It's simply natural that 1 is a lonly number. 2 was happy. 2 was 1's friend. 1 still seemed lonely, but 2 was there to make him feel better. 3. 1 and 2 had a kid. Seriously. 3 was the simple result of 1 and 2. Not that I knew where babies came from then. I may have. I don't remember when that knowledge seeped into my head. 4 was sneaky. Deceitful. Never trust 4. 5 was happy and jolly. 6 always seemed sad or depressed. I never knew why. 7 was cool. Everyone like 7. 7 was that popular kid that no one hated for being popular. Even the unpopular numbers like 4 seemed to like 7. 8 never stood a chance. 3 (apparently all grown up) and 5 were always ganging up on 8. 9 was a magic number. The stuff nine could do was just so cool. Add all the numbers up in a larger number. If they came to 9 then they were really just 9 in disguise. 378 was just 9 in a costume. You get the idea. 10 was like the cop. He was in control. He was older than the other numbers, more like a grown up. After all, he had two digits. 11 never made sense to me. It was a number that just shouldn't be. It's like a 1, but it's not. 11 always just seemed like a lie. 12 was a little like 9. It was a magic number. It even had another name. A dozen. No other number I knew had another name. "I need twelve. Yes, that's right, a dozen." Plus, if you had 12 of something, you could break it into different evenly numbered groups. You can imagine my astonishment when I discovered division later in life. This is just a small peek at how my mind works. Next time on "The Mind of Uncle Monster", we'll discuss the odd associations I have with certain scents. 
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