Subtlety isn’t usually my thing.

I wasn’t going to say anything, but last week I managed to pull off something that felt incredibly geeky and particularly subtle, and I was awfully proud of myself for managing it. Terry mentioned something about this achievement in the comments of the post in question, but I wanted to point it out anyway:

You remember that post from last week with the virtual birthday card I made for Terry’s thirty-sixth birthday? I set myself a challenge with the card…well, actually, two related challenges. I decided that I wanted the body of the card to have exactly thirty-six words (which wasn’t all that hard to do) and I wanted the title of the card to have thirty-six letters (much more difficult to accomplish, let me tell you). Mission accomplished on both fronts. I think it made me most proud to know that no one would likely ever look at the poem closely enough to realize what I had done unless I pointed it out…I got no small amount of satisfaction out of that.

I’m not completely sure why I felt the need to do either of those things; I do know that it feels like there’s something numerologically significant about the number 36, though I don’t know what–perhaps some of my friends who are just as geeky as I am–or even, perhaps, geekier–can help me puzzle that one out.

(Yes, that timestamp is correct. Yes, it’s three o’clock in the morning. No, clearly I can’t sleep. Grr arg.)