Digital Life Story

451903636445827351438058349029262430122119
793141592657550406922334392224969223112922
320375254277551777926243070449774825100482
167441519784221945731194325560815670334438
786449898652755023410159452635531518877460
045288854825100162140120267072624090513203
10491610078633689



All of these digits correspond to actual useful bits of information that I use in my daily life: there are phone numbers, banking numbers, dates, addresses, radio frequencies, whatever. I just took out the decimal points and bunched them together. Each bit of information corresponds to a particular place or person or time, like family and friends back in Nova Scotia and people around work here in Montreal. "Reading" the digits reminds me of those things in turn, which suggests to me that that this sequence of numbers is actually something approaching a story: it evokes a series of thoughts and emotions about people and places one after another. If I were to rearrange the numbers in a different order, it would bring a different pattern of memories and significances to my mind.

But it's a story only I can understand. Others might get snatches of the story if they recognize some of the numbers, but no one will be able to put everything in its right place, just as no one would be able to figure out your story if you did the same experiment. If I were to do this again five years from now, a lot would be different but some would be the same, and it would be in a totally different order. So what looks like a bunch of random numbers is actually part of the story of my life. Weird, eh?