Note to the reader: I’m a little drunk, so there may be some typos. But I initially wrote it while sober, so it’ll still be good.
Probably.

A lot of people remind me of other people. I sometimes make it a game on the bus to determine what combination of celebrities would morph together to form the face of an unsuspecting fellow passenger. Occasionally I will subject Friend and others to these observations. “Your school buddy reminds me of a 20% young Elizabeth Taylor and an 80% old Kirk Douglass". I make these claims with complete confidence and am usually surprised if an argument is raised.

It’s not just people’s faces that get my similarity train chugging; I do the same thing with musical genres and occasionally writing styles. For instance, on my best day, I would classify myself as 4% Kurt Vonnegut and 96% David Sedaris. David and I seem to share a similar worldview, and although I am not quite as successful, I am sure that if we met an indelible literary bond would immediately form. I’m currently reading one of his comedic collections, in part to counteract the spirit-crushing effect of a Milan Kundera novel, which my Captain Obvious made a clear mistake in recommending.

Since I’m feeling particularly David Sedaris-y today, pushing 97%, I thought I’d reminisce about a particularly amusing aspect of my adolescence that I believe will be new to all of you.

As a youngster, I was obsessed with my calculator. I demanded a 10-digit model with the same tenacity and temper tantrums that most children my age reserved for baseball cards or baby ponies. From the start, I was entranced by pi, and quickly memorized the first 10 digits through sheer force of repeated viewing. Sometime later, at the public library, I came across a math book that displayed the first 5000 digits of pi on one page. It struck me as both sacrilegious, that pi was splayed out in naked glory like a gold-hearted female model photographed in the shower, and also highly exciting in approximately the same way.

I visited the book every time I went to the library, each time with the same feeling of guilty pleasure I sought while paging through well-worn romance novels for pages without dialogue. Eventually I figured out that I could take a little of this feeling home with me by memorizing a line or two from the book. This ended up being 50 digits, which I still remember, and are as follows:
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399
Alright, so that’s 46, but you get the point.

I’m not sure why I felt it necessary to divulge this information to anyone, but 15 year-olds are notorious for admitting socially crippling information about themselves, so my skill was soon common knowledge. I quickly acquired such original nicknames such as “Pi-Guy” and “Dumb-ass”, and was the subject of accurate prophesies such as “He won’t get laid till he’s 22”. Even at banquets held at the end of an athletic season to celebrate the accomplishments of the athletes, the attendees would chant “Pi-Guy” until I performed the recital in front of parents, siblings, and other boys whose girlfriends I could only masturbate about. After each performance I was genuinely cheered. It was like getting kicked in the nuts by Jesus.

I was relieved when college offered an atmosphere where almost no one was familiar with my amazing skill, but soon realized that I couldn’t change who I was. From that point on, if anyone wanted to make fun of me for painting a fractal on my dorm-room wall and displaying it proudly with a black light, they could kiss my ass.

That was Sedaris-y. Maybe next time an entry a la Kundera. Expect a fictional story with a lot of infidelity.