Witchy Woman

As a mathematician, I am a woman who puts her faith in numbers, data, science...you know, reality. However, I also know that there are things around us that can't be quantified, categorized, or defined. I guess you could call me MathMercy, Agnostic Mathematician.

Having told you that, I have a confession. Here goes. In addition to being MathMercy, Agnostic Mathematician, I'm pretty sure that I am also a witch. (Yes, I meant to type Witch, smart ass. Bitch stands for Being In Total Control of Herself...and that's no secret. Bam.) Believe me, I know how super weird and hippy-dippy sounding it is for me to just come out and say that I am a Witch, but it comes from a scientific standpoint: I can't deny empirical evidence. Read on and tell me what you would call it, if not Witch.

So, there is an inexplicable phenomenon that happens to me around this time of year, where I am somehow apparently tapped in to totally random and, thus far, useless cosmic forces. It's like phrases that suddenly show up everywhere, coincidences and feelings of deja vu that are just too persistent to be random. Unfortunately, none of this seemingly super cosmic connected-ness ever proves to be useful information like winning Mega-Millions numbers. On the other hand, I never buy Lotto tickets because the mathematician in me has a hard time seeing lottery tickets as anything other an idiot tax. Stupid math. I probably could have been a Mega-Millionaire by now. Anyway, here are some witchy examples on a scale from Kind of Odd to What the Fuck.

1. Last week, I was at a friend's house when she Googled the name of Natalee Holloway, that poor girl that disappeared in Aruba 10 years ago. Yesterday morning, the first news story I read was about new evidence in the case. Kind of Odd.
2. On Saturday, I ended a Facebook post with "Everything's coming up Mercy". One of my brothers picked up on the Simpsons reference and threw 'Everything's coming up Milhouse' back at me. That doesn't count as witchy, but this might: On Sunday, I tuned in to TCM right as Rosalind Russell broke out into "Everything's Coming Up Roses" in the movie, Gypsy. Three references in a sixteen hour period? Everything's Coming Up Weird. 
3. On the morning of May 5, I was moving a raised bed garden box frame to a different spot in my yard. As I moved the frame, I had this sudden memory of how my ex-husband's stepfather had given that garden box to me exactly two years ago to the day, when I saw him for the last time on Cinco de Mayo weekend. I was feeling a little poignant about that memory when I received an email an hour later. The email was from my ex-husband (totally harmless, just needing some information), from whom I probably hadn't heard for six months or more. Um, This is Getting Spooky now.
4. Earlier tonight, I took a silly little online quiz to see what it thought I was in a past life. Eight questions later, it spits out the result in the picture below and I say What. The. Fuck. and throw my phone down like a hot potato.

http://en.what-character-are-you.com/d/en/1101/index/6321.html

"...sense and intuit almost automatically what is going on within the people and the nature around you" finally gives words to my weird Spring psychic sense that I couldn't explain. It's all about recognizing patterns. I am pretty sure it still works within my mathy raison d'etre, as expressed in my favorite math thriller film, Pi. (Okay, you got me. I can't really think of any other math thriller films off the top of my head. Pi is still my favorite, though.)

1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature. 

So there you have it. The evidence keeps mounting and it all points to MathMercy, Agnostic MathWitch. I don't yet know how to channel my witch energies for good, but I am working on it. I'll be sure to let you know if I hit the jackpot. In the meantime, I'm auditioning potential theme music.

Update (12 hours later): Oh my goodness. It just happened again. A couple weeks ago, a friend returned from Hawaii with a gift of tea from the Hanalei Tea Company. A certain demographic will understand why this box of tea has me singing "Puff the Magic Dragon" on a pretty much daily basis. Recall that I work from home, so TV is just part of my rainy day routine. Also, like every other middle-aged white woman in America, I freaking love Wayne Brady, so I like to watch Let's Make A Deal. Anyway, this dude on LMAD just picked "H for my daughter's middle name, Hanalei". It was probably spelled differently, but when Wayne Brady said "Oh, like in 'Puff the Magic Dragon'?", the dude totally agreed. If that isn't proof that I am being followed by Magic, I don't know what is.